Towards Loosely-Coupled Programming on Petascale Systems

We have extended the Falkon lightweight task execution framework to make loosely coupled programming on petascale systems a practical and useful programming model. This work studies and measures the performance factors involved in applying this approach to enable the use of petascale systems by a broader user community, and with greater ease. Our work enables the execution of highly parallel computations composed of loosely coupled serial jobs with no modifications to the respective applications. This approach allows a new-and potentially far larger-class of applications to leverage petascale systems, such as the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer. We present the challenges of I/O performance encountered in making this model practical, and show results using both microbenchmarks and real applications from two domains: economic energy modeling and molecular dynamics. Our benchmarks show that we can scale up to 160K processor-cores with high efficiency, and can achieve sustained execution rates of thousands of tasks per second.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SuperComputing/SC) 200

Introduction to RADR 2019

International audienceThe question of efficient dynamic allocation of compute-node resources, such as cores, by independent libraries or runtime systems can be an nightmare. Scientists writing application components have no way to efficiently specify and compose resource-hungry components. As application software stacks become deeper and the interaction of multiple runtime layers compete for resources from the operating system, it has become clear that intelligent cooperation is needed. Resources such as compute cores, in-package memory, and even electrical power must be orchestrated dynamically across application components, with the ability to query each other and respond appropriately. A more integrated solution would reduce intra-application resource competition and improve performance. Furthermore, application runtime systems could request and allocate specific hardware assets and adjust runtime tuning parameters up and down the software stack. The goal of this workshop is to gather and share the latest scholarly research from the community working on these issues, at all levels of the HPC software stack. This include thread allocation, resource arbitration and management, containers, and so on, from runtime-system designers to compilers. We will also use panel sessions and keynote talks to discuss these issues, share visions, and present solutions. Scope Over the last five years, the number of nodes in large supercomputers has remained largely unchanged. In fact, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory computer leading the Top500 list, Summit, has fewer nodes than its predecessor, which is 20 times slower. Machines are getting faster not by adding nodes, but by adding parallelism, cores, and hierarchical memory to each compute node. This shift in how computers are scaled up makes it imperative that parallel computer resources within a node be carefully orchestrated to achieve maximum performance. Dynamically allocating and managing threads and the mapping of these threads to cores is a challenge that requires cooperation and coordination between the different components of the software stack

Workshop on Resource Arbitration for Dynamic Runtimes (RADR)

International audienceThe question of efficient dynamic allocation of compute-node resources, such as cores, by independent libraries or runtime systems can be an nightmare. Scientists writing application components have no way to efficiently specify and compose resource-hungry components. As application software stacks become deeper and the interaction of multiple runtime layers compete for resources from the operating system, it has become clear that intelligent cooperation is needed. Resources such as compute cores, in-package memory, and even electrical power must be orchestrated dynamically across application components, with the ability to query each other and respond appropriately. A more integrated solution would reduce intra-application resource competition and improve performance. Furthermore, application runtime systems could request and allocate specific hardware assets and adjust runtime tuning parameters up and down the software stack. The goal of this workshop is to gather and share the latest scholarly research from the community working on these issues, at all levels of the HPC software stack. This include thread allocation, resource arbitration and management, containers, and so on, from runtime-system designers to compilers. We will also use panel sessions and keynote talks to discuss these issues, share visions, and present solutions

Narrowing the Search Space of Applications Mapping on Hierarchical Topologies

To be held in conjunction with SC21International audienceProcessor architectures at exascale and beyond are expected to continue to suffer from nonuniform access issues to in-die and node-wide shared resources. Mapping applications onto these resource hierarchies is an on-going performance concern, requiring specific care for increasing locality and resource sharing but also for ensuing contention. Application-agnostic approaches to search efficient mappings are based on heuristics. Indeed, the size of the search space makes it impractical to find optimal solutions nowadays and will only worsen as the complexity of computing systems increases over time. In this paper we leverage the hierarchical structure of modern compute nodes to reduce the size of this search space. As a result, we facilitate the search for optimal mappings and improve the ability to evaluate existing heuristics.Using widely known benchmarks, we show that permuting thread and process placement per node of a hierarchical topology leads to similar performances. As a result, the mapping search space can be narrowed down by several orders of magnitude when performing exhaustive search. This reduced search space will enable the design of new approaches, including exhaustive search or automatic exploration. Moreover, it provides new insights into heuristic-based approaches, including better upper bounds and smaller solution space

SOLAR: A Highly Optimized Data Loading Framework for Distributed Training of CNN-based Scientific Surrogates

CNN-based surrogates have become prevalent in scientific applications to replace conventional time-consuming physical approaches. Although these surrogates can yield satisfactory results with significantly lower computation costs over small training datasets, our benchmarking results show that data-loading overhead becomes the major performance bottleneck when training surrogates with large datasets. In practice, surrogates are usually trained with high-resolution scientific data, which can easily reach the terabyte scale. Several state-of-the-art data loaders are proposed to improve the loading throughput in general CNN training; however, they are sub-optimal when applied to the surrogate training. In this work, we propose SOLAR, a surrogate data loader, that can ultimately increase loading throughput during the training. It leverages our three key observations during the benchmarking and contains three novel designs. Specifically, SOLAR first generates a pre-determined shuffled index list and accordingly optimizes the global access order and the buffer eviction scheme to maximize the data reuse and the buffer hit rate. It then proposes a tradeoff between lightweight computational imbalance and heavyweight loading workload imbalance to speed up the overall training. It finally optimizes its data access pattern with HDF5 to achieve a better parallel I/O throughput. Our evaluation with three scientific surrogates and 32 GPUs illustrates that SOLAR can achieve up to 24.4X speedup over PyTorch Data Loader and 3.52X speedup over state-of-the-art data loaders.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, submitted to VLDB '2

Security

– Economic models/cost, new incenBve models, Qo

Argobots: A Lightweight Low-Level Threading and Tasking Framework

In the past few decades, a number of user-level threading and tasking models have been proposed in the literature to address the shortcomings of OS-level threads, primarily with respect to cost and flexibility. Current state-of-the-art user-level threading and tasking models, however, either are too specific to applications or architectures or are not as powerful or flexible. In this paper, we present Argobots, a lightweight, low-level threading and tasking framework that is designed as a portable and performant substrate for high-level programming models or runtime systems. Argobots offers a carefully designed execution model that balances generality of functionality with providing a rich set of controls to allow specialization by end users or high-level programming models. We describe the design, implementation, and performance characterization of Argobots and present integrations with three high-level models: OpenMP, MPI, and colocated I/O services. Evaluations show that (1) Argobots, while providing richer capabilities, is competitive with existing simpler generic threading runtimes; (2) our OpenMP runtime offers more efficient interoperability capabilities than production OpenMP runtimes do; (3) when MPI interoperates with Argobots instead of Pthreads, it enjoys reduced synchronization costs and better latency-hiding capabilities; and (4) I/O services with Argobots reduce interference with colocated applications while achieving performance competitive with that of a Pthreads approach