Engineering topics

Deakin, Tom

Publications and source records attributed to Deakin, Tom.

3 records

DOE OSTI2019

A performance analysis of the first generation of HPC‐optimized Arm processors

Summary In this paper, we present performance results from Isambard, the first production supercomputer to be based on Arm CPUs that have been optimized specifically for HPC. Isambard is the first Cray XC50 “Scout” system, combining Cavium ThunderX2 Arm‐based CPUs with Cray's Aries interconnect. The full Isambard system will be delivered in the summer of 2018, when it will contain over 10 000 Arm cores. In this work, we present node‐level performance results from eight early‐access nodes that were upgraded to B0 beta silicon in March 2018. We present node‐level benchmark results comparing ThunderX2 with mainstream CPUs, including Intel Skylake and Broadwell, as well as Xeon Phi. We focus on a range of applications and mini‐apps important to the UK national HPC service, ARCHER, as well as to the Isambard project partners and the wider HPC community. We also compare performance across three major software toolchains available for Arm: Cray's CCE, Arm's version of Clang/Flang/LLVM, and GNU.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2017

TeaLeaf: A Mini-Application to Enable Design-Space Explorations for Iterative Sparse Linear Solvers

Iterative sparse linear solvers are an important class of algorithm in high performance computing, and form a crucial component of many scientific codes. As intra and inter node parallelism continues to increase rapidly, the design of new, scalable solvers which can target next generation architectures becomes increasingly important. In this work we present TeaLeaf, a recent mini-app constructed to explore design space choices for highly scalable solvers. We then use TeaLeaf to compare the standard CG algorithm with a Chebyshev Polynomially Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (CPPCG) iterative sparse linear solver. CPPCG is a communication-avoiding algorithm, requiring less global communication than previous approaches. TeaLeaf includes support for many-core processors, such as GPUs and Xeon Phi, and we include strong-scaling results across a range of world-leading Petascale supercomputers, including Titan and Piz Daint.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2016

Many-Core Acceleration of a Discrete Ordinates Transport Mini-App at Extreme Scale, In: ISC High Performance 2016: High Performance Computing

Time-dependent deterministic discrete ordinates transport codes are an important class of application which provide significant challenges for large, many-core systems. One such challenge is the large memory capacity needed by the solve step, which requires us to have a scalable solution in order to have enough node-level memory to store all the data. In our previous work, we demonstrated the first implementation which showed a significant performance benefit for single node solves using GPUs. In this paper we extend our work to large problems and demonstrate the scalability of our solution on two Petascale GPU-based supercomputers: Titan at Oak Ridge and Piz Daint at CSCS. Our results show that our improved node-level parallelism scheme scales just as well across large systems as previous approaches when using the tried and tested KBA domain decomposition technique. We validate our results against an improved performance model which predicts the runtime of the main ‘sweep’ routine when running on different hardware, including CPUs or GPUs.

Computer Science↗