A fast supervised density-based discretization algorithm for classification tasks in the medical domain

Discretization is a preprocessing technique used for converting continuous features into categorical. This step is essential for processing algorithms that cannot handle continuous data as input. In addition, in the big data era, it is important for a discretizer to be able to efficiently discretize data. In this paper, a new supervised density-based discretization (DBAD) algorithm is proposed, which satisfies these requirements. For the evaluation of the algorithm, 11 datasets that cover a wide range of datasets in the medical domain were used. The proposed algorithm was tested against three state-of-the art discretizers using three classifiers with different characteristics. A parallel version of the algorithm was evaluated using two synthetic big datasets. In the majority of the performed tests, the algorithm was found performing statistically similar or better than the other three discretization algorithms it was compared to. Additionally, the algorithm was faster than the other discretizers in all of the performed tests. Finally, the parallel version of DBAD shows almost linear speedup for a Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation (9.64× for 10 nodes), while a hybrid MPI/OpenMP implementation improves execution time by 35.3× for 10 nodes and 6 threads per node.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

XFeatur: Hardware feature extraction for DNN auto-tuning

In this work, we extend the auto-tuning process of the state-of-the-art TVM framework with XFeatur; a tool that extracts new meaningful hardware-related features that improve the quality of the representation of the search space and consequently improve the accuracy of its prediction algorithm. These new features provide information about the amount of thread-level parallelism, shared memory usage, register usage, dynamic instruction count and memory access dependencies. Optimizing ResNet-18 with the proposed features improves the quality of the search space representation by 63% on average and a maximum of 2× for certain tasks, while it reduces the tuning time by 9% (approximately 1.1 hours) and produces configurations that have equal or better performance (up to 92.7%) than the baseline.This work has been supported by the CoCoUnit ERC Advanced Grant of the EU’s Horizon 2020 program (grant No 833057), the Spanish State Research Agency (MCIN/AEI) under grant PID2020-113172RB-I00, and the ICREA Academia program and the FPU grant 2019-FPU-998758.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Auto-tuning Static Schedules for Task Data-flow Applications

Scheduling task-based parallel applications on many-core processors is becoming more challenging and has received lots of attention recently. The main challenge is to efficiently map the tasks to the underlying hardware topology using application characteristics such as the dependences between tasks, in order to satisfy the requirements. To achieve this, each application must be studied exhaustively as to define the usage of the data by the different tasks, that would provide the knowledge for mapping tasks that share the same data close to each other. In addition, different hardware topologies will require different mappings for the same application to produce the best performance.In this work we use the synchronization graph of a task-based parallel application that is produced during compilation and try to automatically tune the scheduling policy on top of any underlying hardware using heuristic-based Genetic Algorithm techniques. This tool is integrated into an actual task-based parallel programming platform called SWITCHES and is evaluated using real applications from the SWITCHES benchmark suite. We compare our results with the execution time of predefined schedules within SWITCHES and observe that the tool can converge close to an optimal solution with no effort from the user and using fewer resources

SWITCHES: A Lightweight Runtime for Dataflow Execution of Tasks on Many-Cores

SWITCHES is a task-based dataflow runtime that implements a lightweight distributed triggering system for runtime dependence resolution and uses static scheduling and compile-time assignment policies to reduce runtime overheads. Unlike other systems, the granularity of loop-tasks can be increased to favor data-locality, even when having dependences across different loops. SWITCHES introduces explicit task resource allocation mechanisms for efficient allocation of resources and adopts the latest OpenMP Application Programming Interface (API), as to maintain high levels of programming productivity. It provides a source-to-source tool that automatically produces thread-based code. Performance on an Intel Xeon-Phi shows good scalability and surpasses OpenMP by an average of 32%