Scheduling Dynamic OpenMP Applications over Multicore Architectures

International audienceApproaching the theoretical performance of hierarchical multicore machines requires a very careful distribution of threads and data among the underlying non-uniform architecture in order to minimize cache misses and NUMA penalties. While it is acknowledged that OpenMP can enhance the quality of thread scheduling on such architectures in a portable way, by transmitting precious information about the affinities between threads and data to the underlying runtime system, most OpenMP runtime systems are actually unable to efficiently support highly irregular, massively parallel applications on NUMA machines. In this paper, we present a thread scheduling policy suited to the execution of OpenMP programs featuring irregular and massive nested parallelism over hierarchical architectures. Our policy enforces a distribution of threads that maximizes the proximity of threads belonging to the same parallel section, and uses a NUMA-aware work stealing strategy when load balancing is needed. It has been developed as a plug-in to the ForestGOMP OpenMP platform. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with a highly irregular recursive OpenMP program resulting from the generic parallelization of a surface reconstruction application. We achieve a speedup of 14 on a 16-core machine with no application-level optimization

Vibration-induced granular segregation: a phenomenon driven by three mechanisms

The segregation of large spheres in a granular bed under vertical vibrations is studied. In our experiments we systematically measure rise times as a function of density, diameter and depth; for two different sinusoidal excitations. The measurements reveal that: at low frequencies, inertia and convection are the only mechanisms behind segregation. Inertia (convection) dominates when the relative density is greater (less) than one. At high frequencies, where convection is suppressed, fluidization of the granular bed causes either buoyancy or sinkage and segregation occurs.Comment: 4 pages. 3 figures, revtex4, to appear in PRL (in press

Singular spectrum analysis filtering and Fourier inversion: an efficient and fast way to improve resolution and quality of current density maps with low-cost Hall scanning systems

We provide a Biot–Savart inversion scheme that, for any two-dimensional, or bulk with planar crystallization, high-temperature superconducting (HTS) sample, determines current density maps with a higher resolution and accuracy than previous procedures and at a fraction of its computational cost. The starting point of our scheme is a Hall scanning microscopy map of the out-of-plane component of the magnetic field generated by the current. Such maps are noisy in scans of real samples with commercial-grade equipment, and their error is the limiting factor in any Biot–Savart inversion scheme. The main innovation of our proposed scheme is a singular spectrum analysis (SSA) filtering of the Hall probe maps, which cancels measurement errors such as noise or drifts without introducing any artifacts in the field map. The SSA filtering of the Hall probe data is so successful in this task that the resulting magnetic field map does not require an overdetermined QR inversion, allowing Fourier inversion of the Biot–Savart problem. Our implementation of SSA filtering of the Hall scan measurements, followed by Biot–Savart inversion using the fast Fourier transform (FFT), is applied to both simulations and real samples of HTS tape stacks. The algorithm works in cases where ill conditioning ruled out the application of Fourier inversion, and achieves a finer resolution for a fraction of the cost of the QR inversion used to date. The computation passes physical and statistical validity tests in all cases, and in three-dimensional samples it is shown to yield the average, with a depth-dependent weight, of the current density circulating in the different layers of the sample.We acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Severo Ochoa Programme (SEV-2015-0496), CONSOLIDER Excellence Network (MAT2015-68994-REDC), COACHSUPENERGY project (MAT2014-51778-C2-1-R, co-financed by FEDER), GAP project (MTM2015-69135-P) and SUPERINKS project (RTC-2015-3640-3, co-financed by FEDER); the European Union for the FASTGRID project (H2020-NMBP-18-2016-IA-72109) and WPMAG 5 (H2020-EUROfusion); and the Catalan Government with 2017-SGR-932, 2014-SGR-753 and Xarmae

Model of coarsening and vortex formation in vibrated granular rods

Neicu and Kudrolli observed experimentally spontaneous formation of the long-range orientational order and large-scale vortices in a system of vibrated macroscopic rods. We propose a phenomenological theory of this phenomenon, based on a coupled system of equations for local rods density and tilt. The density evolution is described by modified Cahn-Hilliard equation, while the tilt is described by the Ginzburg-Landau type equation. Our analysis shows that, in accordance to the Cahn-Hilliard dynamics, the islands of the ordered phase appear spontaneously and grow due to coarsening. The generic vortex solutions of the Ginzburg-Landau equation for the tilt correspond to the vortical motion of the rods around the cores which are located near the centers of the islands.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

On the benefits of tasking with OpenMP

Tasking promises a model to program parallel applications that provides intuitive semantics. In the case of tasks with dependences, it also promises better load balancing by removing global synchronizations (barriers), and potential for improved locality. Still, the adoption of tasking in production HPC codes has been slow. Despite OpenMP supporting tasks, most codes rely on worksharing-loop constructs alongside MPI primitives. This paper provides insights on the benefits of tasking over the worksharing-loop model by reporting on the experience of taskifying an adaptive mesh refinement proxy application: miniAMR. The performance evaluation shows the taskified implementation being 15–30% faster than the loop-parallel one for certain thread counts across four systems, three architectures and four compilers thanks to better load balancing and system utilization. Dynamic scheduling of loops narrows the gap but still falls short of tasking due to serial sections between loops. Locality improvements are incidental due to the lack of locality-aware scheduling. Overall, the introduction of asynchrony with tasking lives up to its promises, provided that programmers parallelize beyond individual loops and across application phases.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Produção de biomassa de adubos verdes no assentamento Paiolzinho, Corumbá, MS.

O experimento foi conduzido no assentamento Paiolzinho, em Corumbá, MS, com o objetivo de avaliar a produção de biomassa de espécies de adubos verdes. Foram 8 tratamentos constando de 5 espécies de adubos verdes, com mucuna-anã em dois espaçamentos, um coquetel com as 5 variedades e pousio como testemunha, tendo 5 repetições, num delineamento experimental inteiramente casualizado. Foram medidos a altura das plantas, a matéria seca da biomassa dos adubos verdes e das plantas espontâneas. O experimento foi instalado em consórcio com mandioca, sendo o plantio dos adubos verdes feito 60 dias após o plantio da mandioca, no final do verão e desenvolvendo-se no outono. Os resultados mostram que a maior produção de biomassa e altura foram obtidas pelo coquetel de adubos verdes.Disponível também em: Cadernos de Agroecologia, V. 5, n.1, 2010

Energy Dissipation and Trapping of Particles Moving on a Rough Surface

We report an experimental, numerical and theoretical study of the motion of a ball on a rough inclined surface. The control parameters are $D$, the diameter of the ball, $\theta$, the inclination angle of the rough surface and $E_{ki}$, the initial kinetic energy. When the angle of inclination is larger than some critical value, $\theta>\theta_{T}$, the ball moves at a constant average velocity which is independent of the initial conditions. For an angle $\theta < \theta_{T}$, the balls are trapped after moving a certain distance. The dependence of the travelled distances on $E_{ki}$, $D$ and $\theta$. is analysed. The existence of two kinds of mechanisms of dissipation is thus brought to light. We find that for high initial velocities the friction force is constant. As the velocity decreases below a certain threshold the friction becomes viscous.Comment: 8 pages RevTeX, 12 Postscript figure

Analysis and Verification of Service Interaction Protocols - A Brief Survey

Modeling and analysis of interactions among services is a crucial issue in Service-Oriented Computing. Composing Web services is a complicated task which requires techniques and tools to verify that the new system will behave correctly. In this paper, we first overview some formal models proposed in the literature to describe services. Second, we give a brief survey of verification techniques that can be used to analyse services and their interaction. Last, we focus on the realizability and conformance of choreographies.Comment: In Proceedings TAV-WEB 2010, arXiv:1009.330

A Functional Safety OpenMP∗ for Critical Real-Time Embedded Systems

OpenMP* has recently gained attention in the embedded domain by virtue of the augmentations implemented in the last specification. Yet, the language has a minimal impact in the embedded real-time domain mostly due to the lack of reliability and resiliency mechanisms. As a result, functional safety properties cannot be guaranteed. This paper analyses in detail the latest specification to determine whether and how the compliant OpenMP implementations can guarantee functional safety. Given the conclusions drawn from the analysis, the paper describes a set of modifications to the specification, and a set of requirements for compiler and runtime systems to qualify for safety critical environments. Through the proposed solution, OpenMP can be used in critical real-time embedded systems without compromising functional safety.This work was funded by the EU project P-SOCRATES (FP7-ICT-2013- 10) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract TIN2015- 65316-P.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The upstream magnetic field of collisionless GRB shocks: constraint by Fermi-LAT observations

Long-lived >100 MeV emission has been a common feature of most Fermi-LAT detected gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), e.g., detected up to ~10^3s in long GRBs 080916C and 090902B and ~10^2s in short GRB 090510. This emission is consistent with being produced by synchrotron emission of electrons accelerated to high energy by the relativistic collisionless shock propagating into the weakly magnetized medium. Here we show that this high-energy afterglow emission constrains the preshock magnetic field to satisfy 1(n/1cc)^{9/8} mG<B<10^2(n/1cc)^{3/8}mG, where n is the preshock density, more stringent than the previous constraint by X-ray afterglow observations on day scale. This suggests that the preshock magnetic field is strongly amplified, most likely by the streaming of high energy shock accelerated particles.Comment: 9 pages, JCAP accepte