Workload-adaptive Scheduling for Efficient Use of Parallel File Systems in High-performance Computing Clusters
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The LLVM Flang compiler ("Flang") is currently Fortran 95 compliant, and the frontend can parse Fortran 2018. However, Flang does not have a comprehensive 2018 test suite and does not fully implement the static semantics of the 2018 standard. We are investigating whether agile software development techniques, such as pair programming and test-driven development (TDD), can help Flang to rapidly progress to Fortran 2018 compliance. Because of the paramount importance of parallelism in high-performance computing, we are focusing on Fortran’s parallel features, commonly denoted “Coarray Fortran.” We are developing what we believe are the first exhaustive, open-source tests for the static semantics of Fortran 2018 parallel features, and contributing them to the LLVM project. A related effort involves writing runtime tests for parallel 2018 features and supporting those tests by developing a new parallel runtime library: the CoArray Fortran Framework of Efficient Interfaces to Network Environments (Caffeine).
The Data Science domain has expanded monumentally in both research and industry communities during the past decade, predominantly owing to the Big Data revolution. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are bringing more complexities to data engineering applications, which are now integrated into data processing pipelines to process terabytes of data. Typically, a significant amount of time is spent on data preprocessing in these pipelines, and hence improving its efficiency directly impacts the overall pipeline performance. The community has recently embraced the concept of Dataframes as the de-facto data structure for data representation and manipulation. However, the most widely used serial Dataframes today (R, pandas) experience performance limitations while working on even moderately large data sets. We believe that there is plenty of room for improvement by taking a look at this problem from a high-performance computing point of view. In a prior publication, we presented a set of parallel processing patterns for distributed dataframe operators and the reference runtime implementation, Cylon. In this paper, we are expanding on the initial concept by introducing a cost model for evaluating the said patterns. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of Cylon on the ORNL Summit supercomputer.
We advocate domain-specific virtual processors (DSVP) as a portability layer for expressing and executing domain-specific computational workloads on modern heterogeneous HPC architectures, with applications in quantum chemistry. Specifically, in this article we extend, generalize and better formalize the concept of a domain-specific virtual processor as applied to scientific high-performance computing. In particular, we introduce a system-wide recursive (hierarchical) hardware encapsulation mechanism into the DSVP architecture and specify a concrete microarchitectural design of an abstract DSVP from which specialized DSVP implementations can be derived for specific scientific domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate, an example of a domain-specific virtual processor specialized to numerical tensor algebra workloads, which is implemented in the ExaTENSOR library developed by the author with a primary focus on the quantum many-body computational workloads on large-scale GPU-accelerated HPC platforms.
As phenomics data volume and dimensionality increase due to advancements in sensor technology, there is an urgent need to develop and implement scalable data processing pipelines. Current phenomics data processing pipelines lack modularity, extensibility, and processing distribution across sensor modalities and phenotyping platforms. To address these challenges, we developed PhytoOracle (PO), a suite of modular, scalable pipelines for processing large volumes of field phenomics RGB, thermal, PSII chlorophyll fluorescence 2D images, and 3D point clouds. PhytoOracle aims to ( i ) improve data processing efficiency; ( ii ) provide an extensible, reproducible computing framework; and ( iii ) enable data fusion of multi-modal phenomics data. PhytoOracle integrates open-source distributed computing frameworks for parallel processing on high-performance computing, cloud, and local computing environments. Each pipeline component is available as a standalone container, providing transferability, extensibility, and reproducibility. The PO pipeline extracts and associates individual plant traits across sensor modalities and collection time points, representing a unique multi-system approach to addressing the genotype-phenotype gap. To date, PO supports lettuce and sorghum phenotypic trait extraction, with a goal of widening the range of supported species in the future. At the maximum number of cores tested in this study (1,024 cores), PO processing times were: 235 minutes for 9,270 RGB images (140.7 GB), 235 minutes for 9,270 thermal images (5.4 GB), and 13 minutes for 39,678 PSII images (86.2 GB). These processing times represent end-to-end processing, from raw data to fully processed numerical phenotypic trait data. Repeatability values of 0.39-0.95 (bounding area), 0.81-0.95 (axis-aligned bounding volume), 0.79-0.94 (oriented bounding volume), 0.83-0.95 (plant height), and 0.81-0.95 (number of points) were observed in Field Scanalyzer data. We also show the ability of PO to process drone data with a repeatability of 0.55-0.95 (bounding area).
We propose several techniques to enhance the parallel scalability of a matrix-free eigensolver designed for studying many-body localization (MBL) of quantum spin chain models with nearest-neighbor interactions and on-site disorder. This type of problem is computationally challenging because the dimension of the associated Hamiltonian matrix grows exponentially with respect to the number of spins L, and we need to average over different realizations of the random disorder to obtain relevant statistical behavior. For each disorder realization, we need to compute eigenvalues from different regions of the spectrum and their corresponding eigenvectors. In previous work, the interior eigenstates for a single eigenvalue problem are computed via the shift-and-invert Lanczos algorithm. Due to the extremely high memory footprint of the LU factorizations, this technique is not well suited for large L’s. For example, we need thousands of compute nodes on modern high performance computing infrastructures to go beyond L = 24. The matrix-free approach does not suffer from this memory bottleneck, however, its scalability is limited by a computation and communication load imbalance. To reduce this imbalance and to significantly enhance the scalability of the matrix-free eigensolver, we reorder the matrix and leverage the consistent space runtime, CSPACER. We also show its efficiency in managing irregular communication patterns at scale compared to optimized MPI non-blocking two-sided and one-sided RMA implementation variants. This effort enables us to study MBL for spin chains with a larger number of spins. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by computing eigenstates on a massively parallel many-core high performance computer.
Bilevel optimization is encountered in many relevant real-world applications. The main feature of this type of problem is that an upper-level optimization problem is constrained by a nested lower-level optimization problem. Because of this nested structure, bilevel problems (BLPs) are usually computationally expensive to solve. Differential evolution (DE) has demonstrated promising results in solving BLPs of relatively small scales. As the problem scale increases, the decision space becomes intrinsically larger, requiring a growing number of function evaluations for the method to work properly. In this context, heavy parallelization and high-performance computing techniques are indispensable to enable the resolution of more complex and challenging optimization problems. Hence, we propose a hierarchical many-threaded parallel DE approach for BLPs, where both levels are parallelized. The computational experiments demonstrate that the parallel implementation achieved runtime speeds ranging from 44 to 2559 times faster than the sequential version on a well-known scalable SMD benchmark test problem when executed on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. The findings indicate that the algorithm’s convergence is strongly influenced by the number of both upper- and lower-level generations. Moreover, the success of experiments with large-scale problems is closely linked to the choice of small population sizes.
Topology optimization (TO) is a popular and powerful computational approach for designing novel structures, materials, and devices. Two computational challenges have limited the applicability of TO to a variety of industrial applications. First, a TO problem often involves a large number of design variables to guarantee sufficient expressive power. Second, many TO problems require a large number of expensive physical model simulations, and those simulations cannot be parallelized. To address these issues, we propose a general scalable deep-learning (DL) based TO framework, referred to as SDL-TO, which utilizes parallel schemes in high performance computing (HPC) to accelerate the TO process for designing additively manufactured (AM) materials. Unlike the existing studies of DL for TO, our framework accelerates TO by learning the iterative history data and simultaneously training on the mapping between the given design and its gradient. The surrogate gradient is learned by utilizing parallel computing on multiple CPUs incorporated with a distributed DL training on multiple GPUs. The learned TO gradient enables a fast online update scheme instead of an expensive update based on the physical simulator or solver. Using a local sampling strategy, we achieve to reduce the intrinsic high dimensionality of the design space and improve the training accuracy and the scalability of the SDL-TO framework. The method is demonstrated by benchmark examples and AM materials design for heat conduction. The proposed SDL-TO framework shows competitive performance compared to the baseline methods but significantly reduces the computational cost by a speed up of around 8.6x over the standard TO implementation.
Improving the understanding of how computational fluid dynamics (CFD) direct numerical simulations (DNS) of flows in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) perform when run in parallel using the high performance computing (HPC) platform Summit at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) is of particular importance to boost the computational tools used to support HFIR conversion to low enriched fuel (LEU). Evaluation of scaling performance was driven by the increasing importance of graphics processing unit (GPU) usage in HPC, which is becoming the standard for modern supercomputers such as Summit. The desired results are to obtain a strong positive correlation between the computational resources dedicated to a problem and the relative speed-up of the simulation in comparison to a benchmark. This capability will allow substantially improvement in HFIR flow analytical capabilities, specifically when predicting turbulence properties at high Reynolds numbers. The study leverages previous simulation results performed with code PHASTA (finite element) on HPC platforms Cori (NERSC) and Theta (ALCF) [1] with computing options provided in the computing platform OpenFOAM (finite volume) at OLCF. Transitioning from PHASTA to OpenFOAM will (1) eliminate dependence on third-party software for mesh generation and manipulation, (2) reduce resource needs by employing modern architectures, and (3) build expertise for future modeling of HFIR-specific problems like heat transfer in involute geometry, entrance effects, flow structure in channel corners, and so on—all important issues when defining the available thermal margins in the transition to LEU. CPUs and GPUs differ significantly in their architecture and utilization, as discussed in the literature [2]. The most important differences are in the approach to computations and their memory. A single GPU contains a large quantity of cores, enabling it to perform with a much higher throughput than a CPU, but execution requires a different approach. GPU codes execute instructions using the Single-Instruction Multiple-Thread (SIMT) approach in which a single instruction is used for groups of threads called warps. A warp typically consists of 32 threads which must execute the same set of instructions, although on separate threads. Alternately, a CPU has far fewer cores that are much more flexible in their operation, excelling at quickly performing more complex serial computations. This is why GPUs have greater throughput when properly utilized. The second important difference is seen when comparing their memory spaces. Limited memory allocations and CPU–GPU communications cause a significant bottleneck in GPU-accelerated programs. Further study was required to properly take advantage of GPU resources. A comprehensive analysis of code performance and the model-specific features of turbulence constitutes the core of this work. In this study, a DNS simulation of HFIR channel turbulence was performed with the finite volume CFD code OpenFOAM v2112 and CUDA v11.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux v8.2. The OpenFOAM installation had AMGx integrated to enable GPU acceleration and utilizes the PETSc4FOAM library. The computational resources and the problem size were scaled on CPU and CPU + GPU architectures to gain a better understanding of the performance of a DNS problem on modern computing hardware. The study aimed to analyze the scaling of the code exclusively on CPUs and then to examine the scaling of the codes with GPU acceleration enabled. Scaling studies included CPU and GPU acceleration on a mesh of varying resolution to analyze the impact of problem size relative to computational resources. In the course of preparing the GPU configuration on Summit, mainly using the AMGX solvers, difficulties were encountered stemming from constant changes resulting from extensive ongoing development activities and the changing environment. This resulted in the inability to complete the GPU portion of the work. The code was compiled and tested, but production runs to assess acceleration were not performed because the used discretional compute time allocation expired as year-end approached. The Summit HPC platform is scheduled for decommissioning in 2024, making it unattractive for future use with Nvidia-based GPUs. Therefore, the work will be moved onto NERSC machines in FY24. An application was prepared and submitted, and sufficient node-hours were awarded to continue the research in the next calendar year. This report summarizes work performed thus far, which mostly focused on CPU OpenFOAM computing.
Abstract—High-performance computing (HPC) applications generate and consume substantial amounts of data, typically managed by parallel file systems. These applications access file systems either through the POSIX interface or by using highlevel I/O libraries. While the POSIX consistency model remains dominant in HPC, emerging file systems and popular I/O libraries increasingly adopt alternative consistency models that relax semantics in various ways, creating significant challenges for correctness and portability. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a trace-driven I/O consistency verification workflow, implemented in our open-source tool, VerifyIO, which collects execution traces, detects data conflicts, and verifies proper synchronization against specified consistency models. Our extensive evaluation of 91 test case executions across three widely used I/O libraries with four I/O consistency models reveals critical consistency issues at both application and implementation levels.
Over the past decade the marine energy industry has continued to grow and evolve, with new concepts and technologies constantly being pursued. Additionally, the field of computing is vastly different today than it was five or ten years ago. By utilizing advanced software and hardware architectures, like graphics processing units as well as parallelization and high-performance computing resources, software can produce higher quality outputs and a higher volume of outputs. These software and hardware resources can enable the marine energy community to exploit computational advancements from other research fields, which can include machine learning, differentiable programming, and controls co-design. Better integration of existing software and development of potential new software is necessary to take advantage of trends in modern computing and respond to the current and future needs of the marine energy community. In order to better understand the existing marine energy software landscape and industry needs, DOE's Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) tasked Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to update the needs assessment by identifying existing software gaps and software needs, and assisting WPTO in planning the next wave of marine energy software development. The proposed effort involved cataloguing and analyzing the available data on existing software related to marine energy. The marine energy software landscape has vastly changed in the last ten years. There are now nearly 230 different software packages utilized by the marine energy sector, compared to a decade ago when the Cardinal Engineering survey identified approximately 40 software packages. In 2012, the marine energy software landscape was captured in two tables, whereas the current marine energy software landscape required development of a software database to collect and categorize software.
The exascale computing era comes with the release of MFIX-Exa, a new code for studying gas-particle fluidization using CFD-DEM and PIC models on massively parallel, heterogeneous high-performance computing architectures. However, as compute resources continue to grow in scale and complexity, so too does the impetus to use them efficiently. Here, we propose a novel bootstrapping method to minimize neglected simulation time and cast the approach more broadly among a growing field of multi-fidelity methods.
The VA Environmental Determinants of Health (EDH) Advanced Software Pipeline Framework is designed to enhance the efficiency, scalability, and security of geospatial data processing workflows. This framework integrates modern data orchestration and containerization technologies, including Prefect for workflow automation, Docker for containerization, and PostgreSQL/PostGIS for geospatial data storage and analysis. It ensures standardized, reproducible, and automated data processing, supporting VA objectives related to substance use risk assessment and recovery research. The pipeline addresses key scalability and performance challenges through horizontal and vertical scaling, high-performance computing (HPC) integration, parallel processing, task caching, and dynamic resource allocation. These optimizations improve throughput and reduce latency, allowing the system to efficiently manage large and complex datasets. Additionally, security and compliance measures—such as data encryption (SSL), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and adherence to GDPR and HIPAA standards—safeguard sensitive information throughout data transmission and storage. A key implementation of this framework includes the automation of shelter list geolocation workflows, ensuring that up-to-date data is readily available for VA decision-making. Lessons learned from this project include the transition from in-memory processing to incremental storage writes, improving resource management and reliability. Future enhancements aim to expand automation, integrate AI-driven anomaly detection, and incorporate high-performance computing resources. This framework provides a scalable, secure, and adaptable solution for managing geospatial datasets, reinforcing the VA’s ability to support clinical and strategic initiatives through data-driven decision-making.
Simulation of multiphase flow in the subsurface is well-known to be computationally challenging. While there have been many studies that have explored approaches to overcoming these challenges, they often utilize relatively simple case studies. In this paper, we focus on the unique numerical challenges posed by modeling large-scale engineered subsurface systems, characterized by discrete features embedded in a heterogeneous natural subsurface setting. The man-made features such as shafts, tunnels, and barriers often cause multiple challenges in modeling the domain for multiphase porous media flow. This flow scenario can have a wide range of applications such as nuclear waste repositories, enhanced recovery of a petroleum reservoir, geothermal engineering, and carbon sequestration. An example of these severe numerical challenges is the case of performance assessment (PA) for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the only operating deep geological repository in the US, which simulates extreme material properties of bedded salt rock formation and extreme contrast due to open excavation next to the formation. The models have extremes not only of permeability and porosity but also of the constitutive models needed for multiphase flow; additionally, they have process models like salt creep closure reducing porosity over time, fracturing in clay and anhydrite interbeds of the bedded salt, gas generation from the waste materials, and unintentional human borehole intrusions in some scenarios. Numerical simulations require the solution of coupled systems of nonlinear PDEs; in our work, we use the open-source simulator PFLOTRAN which is based on Finite Volume discretization. The solution of the nonlinear equations requires use of the Newton-Raphson iteration at each time step, which entails the solution of the linearized Jacobian system at each iteration. The effects of all the processes (i.e., large number of unknowns, highly nonlinear constitutive relations, large contrasts in material properties in short distances) lead to an ill-conditioned Jacobian matrix that severely challenges traditional linear solver, i.e., stabilized biconjugate gradient with block Jacobi incomplete LU preconditioner (BCGS-ILU) leading to non-convergence for traditional Newton-Raphson nonlinear solver causing unacceptably long computation time for each model. This paper presents linear solvers such as constrained pressure residual (CPR) two-stage preconditioner with alternate-block-factorization (ABF) and quasi- implicit pressure and explicit saturation (QIMPES) decouplers and flexible generalized residual solver (FGMRES). The new general-purpose nonlinear solver, Newton trust-region dogleg Cauchy (NTRDC), is also introduced to resolve extreme nonlinearities in the models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of each method relative to the default BCGS-Newton solver. The two best cases had nearly 50 times speed-up and achieved completion of a simulation in 14 hours that never completed due to non-convergence with the default solver. We also investigate the strong scalability of each method and discuss some of the deficiencies found for Block Jacobi preconditioner using parallel domain decomposition, and node packing effects of modern processor architecture.
Coupling multiphase flow with energy transport due to high temperature heat sources introduces significant new challenges since boiling and condensation processes can lead to dry-out conditions with subsequent re-wetting. The transition between two-phase and single-phase behavior can require changes to the primary dependent variables adding discontinuities as well as extending constitutive nonlinear relations to extreme physical conditions. Practical simulations of large-scale engineered domains lead to Jacobian systems with a very large number of unknowns that must be solved efficiently using iterative methods in parallel on high-performance computers. Performance assessment of potential nuclear repositories, carbon sequestration sites and geothermal reservoirs can require numerous Monte-Carlo simulations to explore uncertainty in material properties, boundary conditions, and failure scenarios. Due to the numerical challenges, standard NR iteration may not converge over the range of required simulations and require more sophisticated optimization method like trust-region. In this study, we use the open-source simulator PFLOTRAN for the important practical problem of the safety assessment of future nuclear waste repositories in the U.S. DOE geologic disposal safety assessment Framework. The simulator applies the PETSc parallel framework and a backward Euler, finite volume discretization. We demonstrate failure of the conventional NR method and the success of trust-region modifications to Newton’s method for a series of test problems of increasing complexity. Trust-region methods essentially modify the Newton step size and direction under some circumstances where the standard NR iteration can cause the solution to diverge or oscillate. Furthermore, we show how the Newton Trust-Region method can be adapted for Primary Variable Switching (PVS) when the multiphase state changes due to boiling or condensation. The simulations with high-temperature heat sources which led to extreme nonlinear processes with many state changes in the domain did not converge with NR, but they do complete successfully with the trust-region methods modified for PVS. This implementation effectively decreased weeks of simulation time needing manual adjustments to complete a simulation down to a day. Finally, we show the strong scalability of the methods on a single node and multiple nodes in an HPC cluster.
Imaging Earth structure or seismic sources from seismic data involves minimizing a target misfit function, and is commonly solved through gradient-based optimization. The adjoint-state method has been developed to compute the gradient efficiently; however, its implementation can be time-consuming and difficult. We develop a general seismic inversion framework to calculate gradients using reverse-mode automatic differentiation. The central idea is that adjoint-state methods and reverse-mode automatic differentiation are mathematically equivalent. Here, the mapping between numerical PDE simulation and deep learning allows us to build a seismic inverse modeling library, ADSeismic, based on deep learning frameworks, which supports high performance reverse-mode automatic differentiation on CPUs and GPUs. We demonstrate the performance of ADSeismic on inverse problems related to velocity model estimation, rupture imaging, earthquake location, and source time function retrieval. ADSeismic has the potential to solve a wide variety of inverse modeling applications within a unified framework.
Background: Deep Learning (DL) has advanced the state-of-the-art capabilities in bioinformatics applications which has resulted in trends of increasingly sophisticated and computationally demanding models trained by larger and larger data sets. This vastly increased computational demand challenges the feasibility of conducting cutting-edge research. One solution is to distribute the vast computational workload across multiple computing cluster nodes with data parallelism algorithms. In this study, we used a High-Performance Computing environment and implemented the Downpour Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm for data parallelism to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the natural language processing task of information extraction from a massive dataset of cancer pathology reports. We evaluated the scalability improvements using data parallelism training and the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. To evaluate scalability, we used different numbers of worker nodes and performed a set of experiments comparing the effects of different training batch sizes and optimizer functions.Results: We found that Adadelta would consistently converge at a lower validation loss, though requiring over twice as many training epochs as the fastest converging optimizer, RMSProp. The Adam optimizer consistently achieved a close 2nd place minimum validation loss significantly faster; using a batch size of 16 and 32 allowed the network to converge in only 4.5 training epochs.Conclusions: We demonstrated that the networked training process is scalable across multiple compute nodes communicating with message passing interface while achieving higher classification accuracy compared to a traditional machine learning algorithm.
Genomic datasets are growing dramatically as the cost of sequencing continues to decline and small sequencing devices become available. Enormous community databases store and share these data with the research community, but some of these genomic data analysis problems require large-scale computational platforms to meet both the memory and computational requirements. These applications differ from scientific simulations that dominate the workload on high-end parallel systems today and place different requirements on programming support, software libraries and parallel architectural design. For example, they involve irregular communication patterns such as asynchronous updates to shared data structures. We consider several problems in high-performance genomics analysis, including alignment, profiling, clustering and assembly for both single genomes and metagenomes. We identify some of the common computational patterns or ‘motifs’ that help inform parallelization strategies and compare our motifs to some of the established lists, arguing that at least two key patterns, sorting and hashing, are missing. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science’.