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At least 379 records · Page 21

Π4U: A high performance computing framework for Bayesian uncertainty quantification of complex models

We present Π4U,{sup 1} an extensible framework, for non-intrusive Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification and Propagation (UQ+P) of complex and computationally demanding physical models, that can exploit massively parallel computer architectures. The framework incorporates Laplace asymptotic approximations as well as stochastic algorithms, along with distributed numerical differentiation and task-based parallelism for heterogeneous clusters. Sampling is based on the Transitional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (TMCMC) algorithm and its variants. The optimization tasks associated with the asymptotic approximations are treated via the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). A modified subset simulation method is used for posterior reliability measurements of rare events. The framework accommodates scheduling of multiple physical model evaluations based on an adaptive load balancing library and shows excellent scalability. In addition to the software framework, we also provide guidelines as to the applicability and efficiency of Bayesian tools when applied to computationally demanding physical models. Theoretical and computational developments are demonstrated with applications drawn from molecular dynamics, structural dynamics and granular flow.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Newmark local time stepping on high-performance computing architectures

In multi-scale complex media, finite element meshes often require areas of local refinement, creating small elements that can dramatically reduce the global time-step for wave-propagation problems due to the CFL condition. Local time stepping (LTS) algorithms allow an explicit time-stepping scheme to adapt the time-step to the element size, allowing near-optimal time-steps everywhere in the mesh. We develop an efficient multilevel LTS-Newmark scheme and implement it in a widely used continuous finite element seismic wave-propagation package. In particular, we extend the standard LTS formulation with adaptations to continuous finite element methods that can be implemented very efficiently with very strong element-size contrasts (more than 100x). Capable of running on large CPU and GPU clusters, we present both synthetic validation examples and large scale, realistic application examples to demonstrate the performance and applicability of the method and implementation on thousands of CPU cores and hundreds of GPUs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ADIOS Visualization Schema: A First Step Towards Improving Interdisciplinary Collaboration in High Performance Computing

Scientific communities have benefitted from a significant increase of available computing and storage resources in the last few decades. For science projects that have access to leadership scale computing resources, the capacity to produce data has been growing exponentially. Teams working on such projects must now include, in addition to the traditional application scientists, experts in various disciplines including applied mathematicians for development of algorithms, visualization specialists for large data, and I/O specialists. Sharing of knowledge and data is becoming a requirement for scientific discovery, providing useful mechanisms to facilitate this sharing is a key challenge for e-Science. Our hypothesis is that in order to decrease the time to solution for application scientists we need to lower the barrier of entry into related computing fields. We aim at improving users' experience when interacting with a vast software ecosystem and/or huge amount of data, while maintaining focus on their primary research field. In this context we present our approach to bridge the gap between the application scientists and the visualization experts through a visualization schema as a first step and proof of concept for a new way to look at interdisciplinary collaboration among scientists dealing with big data. The key to our approach is recognizing that our users are scientists who mostly work as islands. They tend to work in very specialized environment but occasionally have to collaborate with other researchers in order to take full advantage of computing innovations and get insight from big data. We present an example of identifying the connecting elements between one of such relationships and offer a liaison schema to facilitate their collaboration.

Computer Science↗

Investigating the Interplay between Energy Efficiency and Resilience in High Performance Computing

Energy efficiency and resilience are two crucial challenges for HPC systems to reach exascale. While energy efficiency and resilience issues have been extensively studied individually, little has been done to understand the interplay between energy efficiency and resilience for HPC systems. Decreasing the supply voltage associated with a given operating frequency for processors and other CMOS-based components can significantly reduce power consumption. However, this often raises system failure rates and consequently increases application execution time. In this work, we present an energy saving undervolting approach that leverages the mainstream resilience techniques to tolerate the increased failures caused by undervolting.

failures↗

Modeling and Predicting Performance of High Performance Computing Applications on Hardware Accelerators

Computers with hardware accelerators, also referred to as hybrid-core systems, speedup applications by offloading certain compute operations that can run faster on accelerators. Thus, it is not surprising that many of top500 supercomputers use accelerators. However, in addition to procurement cost, significant programming and porting effort is required to realize the potential benefit of such accelerators. Hence, before building such a system it is prudent to answer the question 'what is the projected performance benefit from accelerators for the workloads of interest?'. We address this question by way of a performance-modeling framework that predicts realizable application performance on accelerators rapidly and accurately without going to the considerable effort of porting and tuning. The modeling framework first automatically identifies commonly found compute patterns in scientific applications which we term idioms, which may benefit by accelerator technology. Next the framework models the predicted speedup of those idioms if they were to be ported to and run on hardware accelerators. As a proof of concept we characterize two kinds of accelerators 1) the FPGA accelerators on a Convey HC-1 system and 2) an NVIDIA FERMI GPU accelerator. We model performance of the idioms gather/scatter and stream and our predictions show that where these occur in two full-scale HPC applications, Milc and HYCOM, gather/scatter speeds up by as much as 15X, and stream by as much as 14X, whereas the overall compute time of Milc improves by 3.4% and HYCOM by 20%.

Computer Science↗

The TOP500 List and Progress in High-Performance Computing

The TOP500 list has enjoyed incredible success as a metric for supercomputing performance and as a source of data for identifying technological trends, for more than two decades. Here, the project's editors reflect on its usefulness and limitations for guiding large-scale scientific computing into the exascale era.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

New Horizons for High-Performance Computing

Here we provide an overview of the past, present, and a diverse collection of future computer architecture alternatives for HPC. The end of Moore’s Law influenced the current HPC architecture focus on accelerated compute nodes composed of CPU and GPU computing components integrated into massively parallel processor architecture systems. There are many alternatives for future HPC directions, with different technologies, computing ecosystems, opportunities for lead user application-driven customization, and the role of open innovation business models. This paper provides an overview of these different new horizons for HPC, an organizing principle to focus future computing research, different public-private partnership models, and the critical role of workforce development.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Real-Time Stochastic Optimization of Complex Energy Systems on High-Performance Computers

A scalable approach computes in operationally-compatible time the energy dispatch under uncertainty for electrical power grid systems of realistic size with thousands of scenarios. The authors propose several algorithmic and implementation advances in their parallel solver PIPS-IPM for stochastic optimization problems. New developments include a novel, incomplete, augmented, multicore, sparse factorization implemented within the PARDISO linear solver and new multicore- and GPU-based dense matrix implementations. They show improvement on the interprocess communication on Cray XK7 and XC30 systems. PIPS-IPM is used to solve 24-hour horizon power grid problems with up to 1.95 billion decision variables and 1.94 billion constraints on Cray XK7 and Cray XC30, with observed parallel efficiencies and solution times within an operationally defined time interval. To the authors' knowledge, "real-time"-compatible performance on a broad range of architectures for this class of problems hasn't been possible prior to this work

Computer Science↗