Improving Performance and Energy Efficiency of Heterogeneous Systems with rCUDA

Tesis por compendio[ES] En la última década la utilización de la GPGPU (General Purpose computing in Graphics Processing Units; Computación de Propósito General en Unidades de Procesamiento Gráfico) se ha vuelto tremendamente popular en los centros de datos de todo el mundo. Las GPUs (Graphics Processing Units; Unidades de Procesamiento Gráfico) se han establecido como elementos aceleradores de cómputo que son usados junto a las CPUs formando sistemas heterogéneos. La naturaleza masivamente paralela de las GPUs, destinadas tradicionalmente al cómputo de gráficos, permite realizar operaciones numéricas con matrices de datos a gran velocidad debido al gran número de núcleos que integran y al gran ancho de banda de acceso a memoria que poseen. En consecuencia, aplicaciones de todo tipo de campos, tales como química, física, ingeniería, inteligencia artificial, ciencia de materiales, etc. que presentan este tipo de patrones de cómputo se ven beneficiadas, reduciendo drásticamente su tiempo de ejecución. En general, el uso de la aceleración del cómputo en GPUs ha significado un paso adelante y una revolución. Sin embargo, no está exento de problemas, tales como problemas de eficiencia energética, baja utilización de las GPUs, altos costes de adquisición y mantenimiento, etc. En esta tesis pretendemos analizar las principales carencias que presentan estos sistemas heterogéneos y proponer soluciones basadas en el uso de la virtualización remota de GPUs. Para ello hemos utilizado la herramienta rCUDA, desarrollada en la Universitat Politècnica de València, ya que multitud de publicaciones la avalan como el framework de virtualización remota de GPUs más avanzado de la actualidad. Los resutados obtenidos en esta tesis muestran que el uso de rCUDA en entornos de Cloud Computing incrementa el grado de libertad del sistema, ya que permite crear instancias virtuales de las GPUs físicas totalmente a medida de las necesidades de cada una de las máquinas virtuales. En entornos HPC (High Performance Computing; Computación de Altas Prestaciones), rCUDA también proporciona un mayor grado de flexibilidad de uso de las GPUs de todo el clúster de cómputo, ya que permite desacoplar totalmente la parte CPU de la parte GPU de las aplicaciones. Además, las GPUs pueden estar en cualquier nodo del clúster, independientemente del nodo en el que se está ejecutando la parte CPU de la aplicación. En general, tanto para Cloud Computing como en el caso de HPC, este mayor grado de flexibilidad se traduce en un aumento hasta 2x de la productividad de todo el sistema al mismo tiempo que se reduce el consumo energético en un 15%. Finalmente, también hemos desarrollado un mecanismo de migración de trabajos de la parte GPU de las aplicaciones que ha sido integrado dentro del framework rCUDA. Este mecanismo de migración ha sido evaluado y los resultados muestran claramente que, a cambio de una pequeña sobrecarga, alrededor de 400 milisegundos, en el tiempo de ejecución de las aplicaciones, es una potente herramienta con la que, de nuevo, aumentar la productividad y reducir el gasto energético del sistema. En resumen, en esta tesis se analizan los principales problemas derivados del uso de las GPUs como aceleradores de cómputo, tanto en entornos HPC como de Cloud Computing, y se demuestra cómo a través del uso del framework rCUDA, estos problemas pueden solucionarse. Además se desarrolla un potente mecanismo de migración de trabajos GPU, que integrado dentro del framework rCUDA, se convierte en una herramienta clave para los futuros planificadores de trabajos en clusters heterogéneos.[CA] En l'última dècada la utilització de la GPGPU(General Purpose computing in Graphics Processing Units; Computació de Propòsit General en Unitats de Processament Gràfic) s'ha tornat extremadament popular en els centres de dades de tot el món. Les GPUs (Graphics Processing Units; Unitats de Processament Gràfic) s'han establert com a elements acceleradors de còmput que s'utilitzen al costat de les CPUs formant sistemes heterogenis. La naturalesa massivament paral·lela de les GPUs, destinades tradicionalment al còmput de gràfics, permet realitzar operacions numèriques amb matrius de dades a gran velocitat degut al gran nombre de nuclis que integren i al gran ample de banda d'accés a memòria que posseeixen. En conseqüència, les aplicacions de tot tipus de camps, com ara química, física, enginyeria, intel·ligència artificial, ciència de materials, etc. que presenten aquest tipus de patrons de còmput es veuen beneficiades reduint dràsticament el seu temps d'execució. En general, l'ús de l'acceleració del còmput en GPUs ha significat un pas endavant i una revolució, però no està exempt de problemes, com ara poden ser problemes d'eficiència energètica, baixa utilització de les GPUs, alts costos d'adquisició i manteniment, etc. En aquesta tesi pretenem analitzar les principals mancances que presenten aquests sistemes heterogenis i proposar solucions basades en l'ús de la virtualització remota de GPUs. Per a això hem utilitzat l'eina rCUDA, desenvolupada a la Universitat Politècnica de València, ja que multitud de publicacions l'avalen com el framework de virtualització remota de GPUs més avançat de l'actualitat. Els resultats obtinguts en aquesta tesi mostren que l'ús de rCUDA en entorns de Cloud Computing incrementa el grau de llibertat del sistema, ja que permet crear instàncies virtuals de les GPUs físiques totalment a mida de les necessitats de cadascuna de les màquines virtuals. En entorns HPC (High Performance Computing; Computació d'Altes Prestacions), rCUDA també proporciona un major grau de flexibilitat en l'ús de les GPUs de tot el clúster de còmput, ja que permet desacoblar totalment la part CPU de la part GPU de les aplicacions. A més, les GPUs poden estar en qualsevol node del clúster, sense importar el node en el qual s'està executant la part CPU de l'aplicació. En general, tant per a Cloud Computing com en el cas del HPC, aquest major grau de flexibilitat es tradueix en un augment fins 2x de la productivitat de tot el sistema al mateix temps que es redueix el consum energètic en aproximadament un 15%. Finalment, també hem desenvolupat un mecanisme de migració de treballs de la part GPU de les aplicacions que ha estat integrat dins del framework rCUDA. Aquest mecanisme de migració ha estat avaluat i els resultats mostren clarament que, a canvi d'una petita sobrecàrrega, al voltant de 400 mil·lisegons, en el temps d'execució de les aplicacions, és una potent eina amb la qual, de nou, augmentar la productivitat i reduir la despesa energètica de sistema. En resum, en aquesta tesi s'analitzen els principals problemes derivats de l'ús de les GPUs com acceleradors de còmput, tant en entorns HPC com de Cloud Computing, i es demostra com a través de l'ús del framework rCUDA, aquests problemes poden solucionar-se. A més es desenvolupa un potent mecanisme de migració de treballs GPU, que integrat dins del framework rCUDA, esdevé una eina clau per als futurs planificadors de treballs en clústers heterogenis.[EN] In the last decade the use of GPGPU (General Purpose computing in Graphics Processing Units) has become extremely popular in data centers around the world. GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) have been established as computational accelerators that are used alongside CPUs to form heterogeneous systems. The massively parallel nature of GPUs, traditionally intended for graphics computing, allows to perform numerical operations with data arrays at high speed. This is achieved thanks to the large number of cores GPUs integrate and the large bandwidth of memory access. Consequently, applications of all kinds of fields, such as chemistry, physics, engineering, artificial intelligence, materials science, and so on, presenting this type of computational patterns are benefited by drastically reducing their execution time. In general, the use of computing acceleration provided by GPUs has meant a step forward and a revolution, but it is not without problems, such as energy efficiency problems, low utilization of GPUs, high acquisition and maintenance costs, etc. In this PhD thesis we aim to analyze the main shortcomings of these heterogeneous systems and propose solutions based on the use of remote GPU virtualization. To that end, we have used the rCUDA middleware, developed at Universitat Politècnica de València. Many publications support rCUDA as the most advanced remote GPU virtualization framework nowadays. The results obtained in this PhD thesis show that the use of rCUDA in Cloud Computing environments increases the degree of freedom of the system, as it allows to create virtual instances of the physical GPUs fully tailored to the needs of each of the virtual machines. In HPC (High Performance Computing) environments, rCUDA also provides a greater degree of flexibility in the use of GPUs throughout the computing cluster, as it allows the CPU part to be completely decoupled from the GPU part of the applications. In addition, GPUs can be on any node in the cluster, regardless of the node on which the CPU part of the application is running. In general, both for Cloud Computing and in the case of HPC, this greater degree of flexibility translates into an up to 2x increase in system-wide throughput while reducing energy consumption by approximately 15%. Finally, we have also developed a job migration mechanism for the GPU part of applications that has been integrated within the rCUDA middleware. This migration mechanism has been evaluated and the results clearly show that, in exchange for a small overhead of about 400 milliseconds in the execution time of the applications, it is a powerful tool with which, again, we can increase productivity and reduce energy foot print of the computing system. In summary, this PhD thesis analyzes the main problems arising from the use of GPUs as computing accelerators, both in HPC and Cloud Computing environments, and demonstrates how thanks to the use of the rCUDA middleware these problems can be addressed. In addition, a powerful GPU job migration mechanism is being developed, which, integrated within the rCUDA framework, becomes a key tool for future job schedulers in heterogeneous clusters.This work jointly supported by the Fundación Séneca (Agencia Regional de Ciencia y Tecnología, Región de Murcia) under grants (20524/PDC/18, 20813/PI/18 and 20988/PI/18) and by the Spanish MEC and European Commission FEDER under grants TIN2015-66972-C5-3-R, TIN2016-78799-P and CTQ2017-87974-R (AEI/FEDER, UE). We also thank NVIDIA for hardware donation under GPU Educational Center 2014-2016 and Research Center 2015-2016. The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources at CTE-POWER and the technical support provided by Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (RES-BCV-2018-3-0008). Furthermore, researchers from Universitat Politècnica de València are supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEO/2017/077. Authors are also grateful for the generous support provided by Mellanox Technologies Inc. Prof. Pradipta Purkayastha, from Department of Chemical Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata, is acknowledged for kindly providing the initial ligand and DNA structures.Prades Gasulla, J. (2021). Improving Performance and Energy Efficiency of Heterogeneous Systems with rCUDA [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/168081TESISCompendi

Instalación, configuración y evaluación de la red de interconexión EXTOLL en un entorno de memoria distribuida

EXTOLL es una nueva arquitectura de red de interconexión, desarrollada por la Universidad de Heidelberg, que pretende establecerse en el sector del HPCC como una alternativa altamente eficiente y económica. EXTOLL proporciona mecanismos de comunicación eficaces tanto para mensajes de pequeño tamaño como para la transmisión de grandes cantidades de datos mediante mecanismos de Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). Cabe destacar que el diseño de EXTOLL, actualmente en fase de desarrollo, está implementado en una Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), lo que permite realizar modificaciones pero resta prestaciones. Se espera que, para abaratar costes y aumentar prestaciones, el diseño completo acabe integrándose en un chip Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) en un futuro cercano. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que el rendimiento usando EXTOLL es superior al de Gigabit Ethernet, obteniendo un speedup medio de 4x. Para finalizar la comparación de prestaciones, hemos adaptado una rutina paralela, capaz de generar imágenes pertenecientes al conjunto fractal de Mandelbrot, para poder apreciar el diferente nivel de prestaciones existente entre EXTOLL y Gigabit Ethernet en tiempo real. Esto es así porque la modificación realizada en esta aplicación genera muchas comunicaciones por tanto las diferencias de rendimiento de los sistemas de interconexión se ven reflejados en la velocidad de generación de las imágenes.Prades Gasulla, J. (2014). Instalación, configuración y evaluación de la red de interconexión EXTOLL en un entorno de memoria distribuida. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/39652.Archivo delegad

Enhancing large-scale docking simulation on heterogeneous systems: An MPI vs rCUDA study

[EN] Virtual Screening (VS) methods can considerably aid clinical research by predicting how ligands interact with pharmacological targets, thus accelerating the slow and critical process of finding new drugs. VS methods screen large databases of chemical compounds to find a candidate that interacts with a given target. The computational requirements of VS models, along with the size of the databases, containing up to millions of biological macromolecular structures, means computer clusters are a must. However, programming current clusters of computers is no easy task, as they have become heterogeneous and distributed systems where various programming models need to be used together to fully leverage their resources. This paper evaluates several strategies to provide peak performance to a GPU-based molecular docking application called METADOCK in heterogeneous clusters of computers based on CPU and NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Our developments start with an OpenMP, MPI and CUDA METADOCK version as a baseline case of cluster utilization. Next, we explore the virtualized GPUs provided by the rCUDA framework in order to facilitate the programming process. rCUDA allows us to use remote GPUs, i.e. installed in other nodes of the cluster, as if they were installed in the local node, so enabling access to them using only OpenMP and CUDA. Finally, several load balancing strategies are analyzed in a search to enhance performance. Our results reveal that the use of middleware like rCUDA is a convincing alternative to leveraging heterogeneous clusters, as it offers even better performance than traditional approaches and also makes it easier to program these emerging clusters.This work is jointly supported by the Fundacion Seneca (Agencia Regional de Ciencia y Tecnologia, Region de Murcia) under grant 18946/JLI/13, and by the Spanish MEC and European Commission FEDER under grants TIN2015-66972-C5-3-R and TIN2016-78799-P (AEI/FEDER, UE). We also thank NVIDIA for hardware donation under GPU Educational Center 2014-2016 and Research Center 2015-2016. Furthermore, researchers from Universitat Politecnica de Valencia are supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEO/2017/077. Authors are also grateful for the generous support provided by Mellanox Technologies Inc.Imbernón, B.; Prades Gasulla, J.; Gimenez Canovas, D.; Cecilia, JM.; Silla Jiménez, F. (2018). Enhancing large-scale docking simulation on heterogeneous systems: An MPI vs rCUDA study. Future Generation Computer Systems. 79:26-37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.08.050S26377

SLURM Support for Remote GPU Virtualization: Implementation and Performance Study

© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.SLURM is a resource manager that can be leveraged to share a collection of heterogeneous resources among the jobs in execution in a cluster. However, SLURM is not designed to handle resources such as graphics processing units (GPUs). Concretely, although SLURM can use a generic resource plugin (GRes) to manage GPUs, with this solution the hardware accelerators can only be accessed by the job that is in execution on the node to which the GPU is attached. This is a serious constraint for remote GPU virtualization technologies, which aim at providing a user-transparent access to all GPUs in cluster, independently of the specific location of the node where the application is running with respect to the GPU node. In this work we introduce a new type of device in SLURM, "rgpu", in order to gain access from any application node to any GPU node in the cluster using rCUDA as the remote GPU virtualization solution. With this new scheduling mechanism, a user can access any number of GPUs, as SLURM schedules the tasks taking into account all the graphics accelerators available in the complete cluster. We present experimental results that show the benefits of this new approach in terms of increased flexibility for the job scheduler.The researchers at UPV were supported by the the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEOII/2013/009 of the PROMETEO program phase II. Researchers at UJI were supported by MINECO, by FEDER funds under Grant TIN2011-23283, and by the Fundacion Caixa-Castelló Bancaixa (Grant P11B2013-21).Iserte Agut, S.; Castello Gimeno, A.; Mayo Gual, R.; Quintana Ortí, ES.; Silla Jiménez, F.; Duato Marín, JF.; Reaño González, C.... (2014). SLURM Support for Remote GPU Virtualization: Implementation and Performance Study. En Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD), 2014 IEEE 26th International Symposium on. IEEE. 318-325. https://doi.org/10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2014.49S31832

Un nuevo protocolo de control de flujo de extremo a extremo basado en crréditos para redes de altas prestaciones

[EN] High Performance Computing usually leverages messaging libraries such as MPI, GASNet, or OpenSHMEM, among others, in order to exchange data among processes in large-scale clusters. Furthermore, these libraries make use of specialized low-level network layers in order to achieve as much performance as possible from hardware interconnects such as InfiniBand or 40Gb Ethernet, for example. EXTOLL is an emerging network targeted at high performance clusters. Specialized low-level network layers require some kind of flow control in order to prevent buffer overflows at the receiver side. In this work we present a new end-to-end flow control mechanism that is able to dynamically adapt, at execution time, the buffer resources used by a process according to the communication pattern of the parallel application and the varying activity among communicating peers. The tests carried out on a 64-node 1024-core EXTOLL cluster show that our new dynamic flow control mechanism presents very low overhead with an extraordinarily high buffer efficiency, as overall buffer resources are reduced by 4x with respect to the amount of buffers required by a static flow control protocol achieving similar low overhead levels.[ES] La Computación de Alto Rendimiento generalmente aprovecha las bibliotecas de mensajería como MPI, GASNET o OpenSHMEM, entre otras, con el fin de intercambiar datos entre los procesos en clusters de gran dimensión. Por otra parte, estas bibliotecas hacen uso de capas de red especializadas de bajo nivel con el fin de lograr el mayor rendimiento posible en interconexiones hardware tales como InfiniBand o 40 Gb Ethernet, por ejemplo. Extoll es una red emergente dirigida a clusters de alto rendimiento. Algunas capas de red de bajo nivel muy especializadas requieren algún tipo de control de flujo con el fin de evitar desbordamientos de buffer en el lado del receptor. En este trabajo presentamos un nuevo mecanismo de control de flujo extremo-a-extremo que es capaz de adaptar dinámicamente, y en tiempo de ejecución, los recursos de buffer utilizados por un proceso atendiendo al patrón de comunicación de una aplicación paralela y la actividad variable en cuanto a comunicación entre pares. Las pruebas realizadas en un Cluster Extoll de 64 nodos / 1024-cores muestra que nuestro nuevo mecanismo de control de flujo dinámico presenta muy bajo coste operativo con una eficacia extraordinariamente alta en la gestión del buffer, ya que los recursos globales de buffer se reducen 4 veces con respecto a la cantidad de buffers requerida por un protocolo de control de flujo estático, y logrando además un nivel similar en cuanto a sobrecarga respeto a estos últimos.Prades Gasulla, J. (2015). Un nuevo protocolo de control de flujo de extremo a extremo basado en crréditos para redes de altas prestaciones. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/53823TFG

On the design of a new dynamic credit-based end-to-end flow control mechanism for HPC clusters

High Performance Computing usually leverages messaging libraries such as MPI, GASNet, or OpenSHMEM, among others, in order to exchange data among processes in large-scale clusters. Furthermore, these libraries make use of specialized low-level network layers in order to achieve as much performance as possible from hardware interconnects such as InfiniBand or 40 Gb Ethernet, for example. EXTOLL is an emerging network targeted at high performance clusters. Specialized low-level network layers require some kind of flow control in order to prevent buffer overflows at the receiver side. In this paper we present a new end-to-end flow control mechanism that is able to dynamically adapt, at execution time, the buffer resources used by a process according to the communication pattern of the parallel application and the varying activity among communicating peers. The tests carried out on a 64-node 1024-core EXTOLL cluster show that our new dynamic flow control mechanism presents very low overhead with an extraordinarily high buffer efficiency, as overall buffer resources are reduced by 4 with respect to the amount of buffers required by a static flow control protocol achieving similar low overhead levels. 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work was supported by the Spanish MICINN, Plan E funds, under Grant TIN2009-14475-004-01.Prades Gasulla, J.; Silla Jiménez, F.; Fröning, H.; Nuessle, M.; Duato Marín, JF. (2015). On the design of a new dynamic credit-based end-to-end flow control mechanism for HPC clusters. Parallel Computing. 46:32-59. doi:10.1016/j.parco.2015.03.006S32594

Using remote GPU virtualization techniques to enhance edge computing devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the next economic revolution where the main actors are both data and immediacy. The IoT ecosystem is increasingly generating large amounts of data that are created but never analyzed. Efficient big data analysis in IoT infrastructures is becoming mandatory to transform this data deluge into meaningful information. Edge computing is proving to be a compelling alternative for enabling computing capabilities at the edge of the network. These computing capabilities could help in transforming the generated data into useful information. However, the edge computing platforms available on the market are low-power devices with limited computing horsepower. In this paper, we present a novel approach to providing computing resources to edge devices without penalizing their power consumption by using remotely virtualized GPUs. We evaluate this hardware environment by executing a computational-intensive clustering algorithm called Fuzzy Minimals (FM). Our results show that using a remotely virtualized GPU on the edge device provides a 3.2x speed-up factor compared to the local counterpart version. Moreover, we report up to 30% reduction in power consumption and up to 80% of energy savings at the edge device, delegating the GPU workload to the backend, transparently to the programmer.Ingeniería, Industria y Construcció

SLURM Support for Remote GPU Virtualization: Implementation and Performance Study

© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.SLURM is a resource manager that can be leveraged to share a collection of heterogeneous resources among the jobs in execution in a cluster. However, SLURM is not designed to handle resources such as graphics processing units (GPUs). Concretely, although SLURM can use a generic resource plugin (GRes) to manage GPUs, with this solution the hardware accelerators can only be accessed by the job that is in execution on the node to which the GPU is attached. This is a serious constraint for remote GPU virtualization technologies, which aim at providing a user-transparent access to all GPUs in cluster, independently of the specific location of the node where the application is running with respect to the GPU node. In this work we introduce a new type of device in SLURM, "rgpu", in order to gain access from any application node to any GPU node in the cluster using rCUDA as the remote GPU virtualization solution. With this new scheduling mechanism, a user can access any number of GPUs, as SLURM schedules the tasks taking into account all the graphics accelerators available in the complete cluster. We present experimental results that show the benefits of this new approach in terms of increased flexibility for the job scheduler.The researchers at UPV were supported by the the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEOII/2013/009 of the PROMETEO program phase II. Researchers at UJI were supported by MINECO, by FEDER funds under Grant TIN2011-23283, and by the Fundacion Caixa-Castelló Bancaixa (Grant P11B2013-21).Iserte Agut, S.; Castello Gimeno, A.; Mayo Gual, R.; Quintana Ortí, ES.; Silla Jiménez, F.; Duato Marín, JF.; Reaño González, C.... (2014). SLURM Support for Remote GPU Virtualization: Implementation and Performance Study. En Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD), 2014 IEEE 26th International Symposium on. IEEE. 318-325. https://doi.org/10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2014.49S31832