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At least 37 records · Page 2

MPI, HPF or OpenMP: A Study with the NAS Benchmarks

Porting applications to new high performance parallel and distributed platforms is a challenging task. Writing parallel code by hand is time consuming and costly, but the task can be simplified by high level languages and would even better be automated by parallelizing tools and compilers. The definition of HPF (High Performance Fortran, based on data parallel model) and OpenMP (based on shared memory parallel model) standards has offered great opportunity in this respect. Both provide simple and clear interfaces to language like FORTRAN and simplify many tedious tasks encountered in writing message passing programs. In our study we implemented the parallel versions of the NAS Benchmarks with HPF and OpenMP directives. Comparison of their performance with the MPI implementation and pros and cons of different approaches will be discussed along with experience of using computer-aided tools to help parallelize these benchmarks. Based on the study,potentials of applying some of the techniques to realistic aerospace applications will be presented

Jin, Hao-Qiang↗

Comparing the OpenMP, MPI, and Hybrid Programming Paradigm on an SMP Cluster

Clusters of SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processors) nodes provide support for a wide range of parallel programming paradigms. The shared address space within each node is suitable for OpenMP parallelization. Message passing can be employed within and across the nodes of a cluster. Multiple levels of parallelism can be achieved by combining message passing and OpenMP parallelization. Which programming paradigm is the best will depend on the nature of the given problem, the hardware components of the cluster, the network, and the available software. In this study we compare the performance of different implementations of the same CFD benchmark application, using the same numerical algorithm but employing different programming paradigms.

Jost, Gabriele↗

Parallelization of a Six Degree of Freedom Entry Vehicle Trajectory Simulation Using OpenMP and OpenACC

The art and science of writing parallelized software, using methods such as Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) and Open Accelerators (OpenACC), is dominated by computer scientists. Engineers and non-computer scientists looking to apply these techniques to their project applications face a steep learning curve, especially when looking to adapt their original single threaded software to run multi-threaded on graphics processing units (GPUs). There are significant changes in mindset that must occur; such as how to manage memory, the organization of instructions, and the use of if statements (also known as branching). The purpose of this work is twofold: 1) to demonstrate the applicability of parallelized coding methodologies, OpenMP and OpenACC, to tasks outside of the typical large scale matrix mathematics; and 2) to discuss, from an engineer’s perspective, the lessons learned from parallelizing software using these computer science techniques. This work applies OpenMP, on both multi-core central processing units (CPUs) and Intel® Xeon Phi™ 7210, and OpenACC on GPUs. These parallelization techniques are used to tackle the simulation of thousands of entry vehicle trajectories through the integration of six degree of freedom (DoF) equations of motion (EoM). The forces and moments acting on the entry vehicle, and used by the EoM, are estimated using multiple models of varying levels of complexity. Several benchmark comparisons are made on the execution of six DoF trajectory simulation: single thread Intel® Xeon® E5-2670 CPU, multi-thread CPU using OpenMP, multi-thread Xeon Phi™ 7210 using OpenMP, and multi-thread NVIDIA® Tesla® K40 GPU using OpenACC. These benchmarks are run on the Pleiades Supercomputer Cluster at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center (ARC), and a Xeon Phi™ 7210 node at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC).

Green, Justin S.↗

Automatic Generation of Directive-Based Parallel Programs for Shared Memory Parallel Systems

The shared-memory programming model is a very effective way to achieve parallelism on shared memory parallel computers. As great progress was made in hardware and software technologies, performance of parallel programs with compiler directives has demonstrated large improvement. The introduction of OpenMP directives, the industrial standard for shared-memory programming, has minimized the issue of portability. Due to its ease of programming and its good performance, the technique has become very popular. In this study, we have extended CAPTools, a computer-aided parallelization toolkit, to automatically generate directive-based, OpenMP, parallel programs. We outline techniques used in the implementation of the tool and present test results on the NAS parallel benchmarks and ARC3D, a CFD application. This work demonstrates the great potential of using computer-aided tools to quickly port parallel programs and also achieve good performance.

Jin, Hao-Qiang↗

Automation of Data Traffic Control on DSM Architecture

The design of distributed shared memory (DSM) computers liberates users from the duty to distribute data across processors and allows for the incremental development of parallel programs using, for example, OpenMP or Java threads. DSM architecture greatly simplifies the development of parallel programs having good performance on a few processors. However, to achieve a good program scalability on DSM computers requires that the user understand data flow in the application and use various techniques to avoid data traffic congestions. In this paper we discuss a number of such techniques, including data blocking, data placement, data transposition and page size control and evaluate their efficiency on the NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) Parallel Benchmarks. We also present a tool which automates the detection of constructs causing data congestions in Fortran array oriented codes and advises the user on code transformations for improving data traffic in the application.

Frumkin, Michael↗

A Conservative, Scalable, Space-Time Blade Element Rotor Model for Multi-Rotor Vehicles

The development of a parallel blade-element rotor model and its implementation into an adaptive Cartesian method is described. The unsteady version of the rotor model applies a body force to all cells contained in the swept space-time volume at each timestep and special care is taken to maintain axisymmetry on the Cartesian grid. Mesh convergence of rotor thrust and torque is obtained with around 10000 cells in the disk for the steady model. Parallelization is accomplished using OpenMP and the rotor force computation is distributed across all available nodes. Simulations of an isolated XV-15 rotor in hover show good correlation with experimental data and predictions of multi-rotor thrust variation closely match previous high fidelity simulations. The final paper will also include results from the unsteady rotor model and parallel scaling tests.

Conservative↗

The Automatic Parallelisation of Scientific Application Codes Using a Computer Aided Parallelisation Toolkit

The shared-memory programming model is a very effective way to achieve parallelism on shared memory parallel computers. Historically, the lack of a programming standard for using directives and the rather limited performance due to scalability have affected the take-up of this programming model approach. Significant progress has been made in hardware and software technologies, as a result the performance of parallel programs with compiler directives has also made improvements. The introduction of an industrial standard for shared-memory programming with directives, OpenMP, has also addressed the issue of portability. In this study, we have extended the computer aided parallelization toolkit (developed at the University of Greenwich), to automatically generate OpenMP based parallel programs with nominal user assistance. We outline the way in which loop types are categorized and how efficient OpenMP directives can be defined and placed using the in-depth interprocedural analysis that is carried out by the toolkit. We also discuss the application of the toolkit on the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and a number of real-world application codes. This work not only demonstrates the great potential of using the toolkit to quickly parallelize serial programs but also the good performance achievable on up to 300 processors for hybrid message passing and directive-based parallelizations.

Ierotheou, C.↗

Automatic Generation of OpenMP Directives and Its Application to Computational Fluid Dynamics Codes

The shared-memory programming model is a very effective way to achieve parallelism on shared memory parallel computers. As great progress was made in hardware and software technologies, performance of parallel programs with compiler directives has demonstrated large improvement. The introduction of OpenMP directives, the industrial standard for shared-memory programming, has minimized the issue of portability. In this study, we have extended CAPTools, a computer-aided parallelization toolkit, to automatically generate OpenMP-based parallel programs with nominal user assistance. We outline techniques used in the implementation of the tool and discuss the application of this tool on the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and several computational fluid dynamics codes. This work demonstrates the great potential of using the tool to quickly port parallel programs and also achieve good performance that exceeds some of the commercial tools.

Yan, Jerry↗

Performance Characteristics of the Multi-Zone NAS Parallel Benchmarks

We describe a new suite of computational benchmarks that models applications featuring multiple levels of parallelism. Such parallelism is often available in realistic flow computations on systems of grids, but had not previously been captured in bench-marks. The new suite, named NPB Multi-Zone, is extended from the NAS Parallel Benchmarks suite, and involves solving the application benchmarks LU, BT and SP on collections of loosely coupled discretization meshes. The solutions on the meshes are updated independently, but after each time step they exchange boundary value information. This strategy provides relatively easily exploitable coarse-grain parallelism between meshes. Three reference implementations are available: one serial, one hybrid using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and OpenMP, and another hybrid using a shared memory multi-level programming model (SMP+OpenMP). We examine the effectiveness of hybrid parallelization paradigms in these implementations on three different parallel computers. We also use an empirical formula to investigate the performance characteristics of the multi-zone benchmarks.

Jin, Haoqiang↗

Optics Program Modified for Multithreaded Parallel Computing

A powerful high-performance computer program for simulating and analyzing adaptive and controlled optical systems has been developed by modifying the serial version of the Modeling and Analysis for Controlled Optical Systems (MACOS) program to impart capabilities for multithreaded parallel processing on computing systems ranging from supercomputers down to Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) personal computers. The modifications included the incorporation of OpenMP, a portable and widely supported application interface software, that can be used to explicitly add multithreaded parallelism to an application program under a shared-memory programming model. OpenMP was applied to parallelize ray-tracing calculations, one of the major computing components in MACOS. Multithreading is also used in the diffraction propagation of light in MACOS based on pthreads [POSIX Thread, (where "POSIX" signifies a portable operating system for UNIX)]. In tests of the parallelized version of MACOS, the speedup in ray-tracing calculations was found to be linear, or proportional to the number of processors, while the speedup in diffraction calculations ranged from 50 to 60 percent, depending on the type and number of processors. The parallelized version of MACOS is portable, and, to the user, its interface is basically the same as that of the original serial version of MACOS.

Lou, John↗

Highly parallel structured adaptive mesh refinement using parallel language-based approaches

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) calculations carried out on structured meshes play an exceedingly important role in several areas of science and engineering. A strategy for using Fortran 90 in an object-oriented fashion is presented. This permits AMR applications to be expressed in terms of familiar abstractions that are natural to the process of solving AMR hierarchies. The OpenMP features that are useful for parallel processing of AMR hierarchies in a load balanced fashion on multiprocessors is described.

computational↗

Development of Message Passing Routines for High Performance Parallel Computations

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations require a great deal of computing power for completing the detailed computations involved. In an effort shorten the time it takes to complete such calculations they are implemented on a parallel computer. In the case of a parallel computer some sort of message passing structure must be used to communicate between the computers because, unlike a single machine, each computer in a parallel computing cluster does not have access to all the data or run all the parts of the total program. Thus, message passing is used to divide up the data and send instructions to each machine. The nature of my work this summer involves programming the "message passing" aspect of the parallel computer. I am working on modifying an existing program, which was written with OpenMP, and does not use a multi-machine parallel computing structure, to work with Message Passing Interface (MPI) routines. The actual code is being written in the FORTRAN 90 programming language. My goal is to write a parameterized message passing structure that could be used for a variety of individual applications and implement it on Silicon Graphics Incorporated s (SGI) IRIX operating system. With this new parameterized structure engineers would be able to speed up computations for a wide variety of purposes without having to use larger and more expensive computing equipment from another division or another NASA center.

Summers, Edward K.↗

Performance Analysis of a Hybrid Overset Multi-Block Application on Multiple Architectures

This paper presents a detailed performance analysis of a multi-block overset grid compu- tational fluid dynamics app!ication on multiple state-of-the-art computer architectures. The application is implemented using a hybrid MPI+OpenMP programming paradigm that exploits both coarse and fine-grain parallelism; the former via MPI message passing and the latter via OpenMP directives. The hybrid model also extends the applicability of multi-block programs to large clusters of SNIP nodes by overcoming the restriction that the number of processors be less than the number of grid blocks. A key kernel of the application, namely the LU-SGS linear solver, had to be modified to enhance the performance of the hybrid approach on the target machines. Investigations were conducted on cacheless Cray SX6 vector processors, cache-based IBM Power3 and Power4 architectures, and single system image SGI Origin3000 platforms. Overall results for complex vortex dynamics simulations demonstrate that the SX6 achieves the highest performance and outperforms the RISC-based architectures; however, the best scaling performance was achieved on the Power3.

Djomehri, M. Jahed↗

Parallelization of Lower-Upper Symmetric Gauss-Seidel Method for Chemically Reacting Flow

Development of technologies for exploration of the solar system has revived an interest in computational simulation of chemically reacting flows since planetary probe vehicles exhibit non-equilibrium phenomena during the atmospheric entry of a planet or a moon as well as the reentry to the Earth. Stability in combustion is essential for new propulsion systems. Numerical solution of real-gas flows often increases computational work by an order-of-magnitude compared to perfect gas flow partly because of the increased complexity of equations to solve. Recently, as part of Project Columbia, NASA has integrated a cluster of interconnected SGI Altix systems to provide a ten-fold increase in current supercomputing capacity that includes an SGI Origin system. Both the new and existing machines are based on cache coherent non-uniform memory access architecture. Lower-Upper Symmetric Gauss-Seidel (LU-SGS) relaxation method has been implemented into both perfect and real gas flow codes including Real-Gas Aerodynamic Simulator (RGAS). However, the vectorized RGAS code runs inefficiently on cache-based shared-memory machines such as SGI system. Parallelization of a Gauss-Seidel method is nontrivial due to its sequential nature. The LU-SGS method has been vectorized on an oblique plane in INS3D-LU code that has been one of the base codes for NAS Parallel benchmarks. The oblique plane has been called a hyperplane by computer scientists. It is straightforward to parallelize a Gauss-Seidel method by partitioning the hyperplanes once they are formed. Another way of parallelization is to schedule processors like a pipeline using software. Both hyperplane and pipeline methods have been implemented using openMP directives. The present paper reports the performance of the parallelized RGAS code on SGI Origin and Altix systems.

Yoon, Seokkwan↗

An Investigation of Parallel Programming Techniques Applied to Monte Carlo Simulations for Post-Flight Reconstruction of Spacecraft Trajectory

Parallelizing software to execute on multi-core central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) can be challenging. For some fields outside of Computer Science, this transition comes with new issues. For example, memory limitations can require modifications to code not initially developed to run on GPUs. This work applies the Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) and Open Accelerators (OpenACC) directive-based parallelization strategies on a Monte Carlo simulation approach for trajectory reconstruction enabling it to run on multi-core CPUs and GPUs. Large matrix operations are the most common use of GPUs, which are not present in this algorithm; however, the natural parallelism of independent trajectories in Monte Carlo simulations is exploited. Benchmarking data are presented comparing execution times of the software for single-thread CPUs, multi-thread CPUs with OpenMP, and multi-thread GPUs using OpenACC. These data were collected using nodes with Intel® Xeon® E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) CPUs enhanced with NVIDIA® Tesla® K40 GPUs on the Pleiades Supercomputer cluster at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center (ARC) and a local Intel® Xeon Phi™ node at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC).

Williams, R. Anthony↗

Hybrid MPI+OpenMP Programming of an Overset CFD Solver and Performance Investigations

This report describes a two level parallelization of a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) solver with multi-zone overset structured grids. The approach is based on a hybrid MPI+OpenMP programming model suitable for shared memory and clusters of shared memory machines. The performance investigations of the hybrid application on an SGI Origin2000 (O2K) machine is reported using medium and large scale test problems.

Djomehri, M. Jahed↗

Tools to Rapidly and Effectively Parallelise Serial FORTRAN Codes Using Either MPI or OpenMP

Significant progress has been made in hardware and software technologies, as a result the use of efficient standard message passing communication calls in parallel application codes has greatly assisted in reducing execution times. In addition, the introduction of OpenMP, an industrial standard for shared memory programming with directives addresses the issue of portability and also provides a means to deliver respectable performance. In general however, the manual parallelisation of a user's application code using either message passing or directives is still a very costly and error-prone process.

Jin, Hao-Qiang↗