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Tang, Li

Publications and source records attributed to Tang, Li.

The ECP SICM project: Managing complex memory hierarchies for exascale applications

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP)’s Simplified Interface to Complex Memories (SICM) effort focuses on developing universal interfaces for discovering, managing, and sharing data across complex memory hierarchies. These facilitate the exploitation of emerging memory technologies and support precise control over their various trade-offs such as high-bandwidth versus low-latency, persistent versus ephemeral, high-capacity versus low-capacity, and near-CPU versus near-GPU. SICM comprises three interrelated components: a low-level interface, a high-level interface, and a persistent-heap interface. The low-level SICM interface is intended for system and run-time developers as well as expert application developers who prefer full control of the memory objects used within their application. The high-level SICM interface builds upon the low-level interface, employing application-level profiling and analysis to optimize data management for complex memory hierarchies. The persistent-heap interface provides applications with a persistent memory allocator that can allocate custom C++ data structures in both block-storage and byte-addressable persistent memories.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Concurrent Inter-Model Spread of Boreal Winter Westerly Jet Meridional Positions Between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in CMIP6 Models

Here, this study investigates the inter-model spread of climatological extratropical westerly jets in boreal winter, using the historical simulation of 52 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) models from 1851 to 2014. The results show that there is a substantial spread in the latitude of the upper-tropospheric westerly jet across models, characterised by large inter-model standard deviations to both the poleward and equatorward sides of the jet axis, although the multi-model ensemble mean (MME) performs well in simulating meridional position of westerly jets. Furthermore, we detect the consistency of inter-model jet position spread between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, based on the inter-model empirical orthogonal function (EOF) decomposition and correlation of regional-averaged zonal winds. Specifically, the models that simulate the westerly jets poleward/equatorward relative to the MME position in one hemisphere also tend to simulate the jets poleward/equatorward in the other hemisphere. Accordingly, we define a global jet spread index to depict the concurrence of jet shift in the two hemispheres. The results of inter-model regression analyses based on this index indicate that the models positioning the jets poleward than the MME tend to simulate a wider Hadley Cell, a poleward-shifted Ferrel Cell in the Southern Hemisphere, enhanced precipitation in the subtropics and suppressed precipitation in the tropics, and warmer sea surface temperatures in the subtropics and mid-latitudes. The present results suggest that improving the simulation of jet positions in climate models requires a comprehensive consideration of thermal states in the tropics and subtropics/mid latitudes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

CLC: A cross-level program characterization method

Characterization of program execution plays a key role in performance improvement. There are numerous transformations applied to each step that a program takes on its lowering from source code to a compiler intermediate representation to machine language to microarchitecture-specific execution. The unpredictable benefit of each transformation step could lead a notionally superior algorithm to exhibit inferior performance once actually run, and it can be hard to discern which step in the transformation path contradicted the code developer’s assumptions. Conventional approaches to program-execution characterization consider the behavior after only a single one of those steps, which limits the information that can be provided to the user. To help address the issue of myopic views of program execution, this paper presents a novel cross-level characterization approach for understanding the behavior of program execution at different levels in the process of writing, compiling, and running a program. We show that this approach provides a richer view of the sources of performance gains and losses and helps identify program execution in a more accurate manner.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗