A novel method for scaling iterative solvers: avoiding latency overhead of parallel sparse-matrix vector multiplies

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In parallel linear iterative solvers, sparse matrix vector multiplication (SpMxV) incurs irregular point-to-point (P2P) communications, whereas inner product computations incur regular collective communications. These P2P communications cause an additional synchronization point with relatively high message latency costs due to small message sizes. In these solvers, each SpMxV is usually followed by an inner product computation that involves the output vector of SpMxV. Here, we exploit this property to propose a novel parallelization method that avoids the latency costs and synchronization overhead of P2P communications. Our method involves a computational and a communication rearrangement scheme. The computational rearrangement provides an alternative method for forming input vector of SpMxV and allows P2P and collective communications to be performed in a single phase. The communication rearrangement realizes this opportunity by embedding P2P communications into global collective communication operations. The proposed method grants a certain value on the maximum number of messages communicated regardless of the sparsity pattern of the matrix. The downside, however, is the increased message volume and the negligible redundant computation. We favor reducing the message latency costs at the expense of increasing message volume. Yet, we propose two iterative-improvement-based heuristics to alleviate the increase in the volume through one-to-one task-to-processor mapping. Our experiments on two supercomputers, Cray XE6 and IBM BlueGene/Q, up to 2,048 processors show that the proposed parallelization method exhibits superior scalable performance compared to the conventional parallelization method

ADEPT: a domain independent sequence alignment strategy for gpu architectures

BackgroundBioinformatic workflows frequently make use of automated genome assembly and protein clustering tools. At the core of most of these tools, a significant portion of execution time is spent in determining optimal local alignment between two sequences. This task is performed with the Smith-Waterman algorithm, which is a dynamic programming based method. With the advent of modern sequencing technologies and increasing size of both genome and protein databases, a need for faster Smith-Waterman implementations has emerged. Multiple SIMD strategies for the Smith-Waterman algorithm are available for CPUs. However, with the move of HPC facilities towards accelerator based architectures, a need for an efficient GPU accelerated strategy has emerged. Existing GPU based strategies have either been optimized for a specific type of characters (Nucleotides or Amino Acids) or for only a handful of application use-cases.ResultsIn this paper, we present ADEPT, a new sequence alignment strategy for GPU architectures that is domain independent, supporting alignment of sequences from both genomes and proteins. Our proposed strategy uses GPU specific optimizations that do not rely on the nature of sequence. We demonstrate the feasibility of this strategy by implementing the Smith-Waterman algorithm and comparing it to similar CPU strategies as well as the fastest known GPU methods for each domain. ADEPT's driver enables it to scale across multiple GPUs and allows easy integration into software pipelines which utilize large scale computational systems. We have shown that the ADEPT based Smith-Waterman algorithm demonstrates a peak performance of 360 GCUPS and 497 GCUPs for protein based and DNA based datasets respectively on a single GPU node (8 GPUs) of the Cori Supercomputer. Overall ADEPT shows 10x faster performance in a node-to-node comparison against a corresponding SIMD CPU implementation.ConclusionsADEPT demonstrates a performance that is either comparable or better than existing GPU strategies. We demonstrated the efficacy of ADEPT in supporting existing bionformatics software pipelines by integrating ADEPT in MetaHipMer a high-performance denovo metagenome assembler and PASTIS a high-performance protein similarity graph construction pipeline. Our results show 10% and 30% boost of performance in MetaHipMer and PASTIS respectively

The Effect of Various Sparsity Structures on Parallelism and Algorithms to Reveal Those Structures

Structured sparse matrices can greatly benefit parallel numerical methods in terms of parallel performance and convergence. In this chapter, we present combinatorial models for obtaining several different sparse matrix forms. There are four basic forms we focus on: singly-bordered block-diagonal form, doubly-bordered block-diagonal form, nonempty off-diagonal block minimization, and block diagonal with overlap form. For each of these forms, we first present the form in detail and describe what goals are sought within the form, and then examine the combinatorial models that attain the respective form while targeting the sought goals, and finally explain in which aspects the forms benefit certain parallel numerical methods and their relationship with the models. Our work focuses especially on graph and hypergraph partitioning models in obtaining the mentioned forms. Despite their relatively high preprocessing overhead compared to other heuristics, they have proven to model the given problem more accurately and this overhead can be often amortized due the fact that matrix structure does not change much during a typical numerical simulation. This chapter presents a number of models and their relationship with parallel numerical methods