Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “parallel algorithm”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 649 records · Page 36

The LSBmax algorithm for boosting resilience of electric grids post (N‐2) contingencies

Abstract A computationally improved algorithm is presented to find the best transmission switching (TS) candidate for boosting resilience of electricity grids subject to ( N ‐2) contingencies. Here, resilience is computed as the reduction in load shed after the above‐mentioned ( N‐ ) contingencies. TS is a planned line outage, and past research shows that changing the transmission system's topology changes the power flow and removes post contingency violations. Finding the best TS candidate in a computationally suitable time for effectively boosting resilience is a challenge. The best TS candidate is found using a novel heuristic method by decreasing the search space based on proximity to the bus with the maximum load shedding (LSB). The LSB algorithm is faster than existing algorithms in the literature; and, it is compatible with both the AC and DC optimal power flow formulations. To validate the authors' claims of speedup and accuracy, two metrics are used to analyze the results from the IEEE 39‐bus and 118‐bus systems. Finally, the inherent parallelism of the LSB algorithm is leveraged on a high‐performance computing platform and applied to the large‐scale Polish 2383‐bus test system to validate scalability in both size and speedup in computation time.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Accurate modeling of plasma acceleration with arbitrary order pseudo-spectral particle-in-cell methods

Particle in Cell (PIC) simulations are a widely used tool for the investigation of both laser- and beam-driven plasma acceleration. It is a known issue that the beam quality can be artificially degraded by numerical Cherenkov radiation (NCR) resulting primarily from an incorrectly modeled dispersion relation. Pseudo-spectral solvers featuring infinite order stencils can strongly reduce NCR - or even suppress it - and are therefore well suited to correctly model the beam properties. For efficient parallelization of the PIC algorithm, however, localized solvers are inevitable. Arbitrary order pseudo-spectral methods provide this needed locality. Yet, these methods can again be prone to NCR. Here in this paper, we show that acceptably low solver orders are sufficient to correctly model the physics of interest, while allowing for parallel computation by domain decomposition.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Multichannel Analysis of Surface Waves Accelerated (MASWAccelerated): Software for efficient surface wave inversion using MPI and GPUs

Multichannel Analysis of Surface Waves (MASW) is a technique frequently used in geotechnical engineering and engineering geophysics to infer 1D layered models of seismic shear wave velocities in the top tens to hundreds of meters of the subsurface. We aim to accelerate MASW calculations by capitalizing on modern computer hardware available in the workstations of most engineers: multiple cores and graphics processing units (GPUs). We propose new parallel and GPU accelerated algorithms for computing 1D MASW inversion, and provide software implementations in C using Message Passing Interface (MPI) and CUDA. These algorithms take advantage of sparsity that arises in the problem, and the work balance between processes considers typical data trends. We compare our methods to an existing open source Matlab MASW tool. Our serial C implementation achieves a 2x speedup over the Matlab software, and we continue to see improvements by parallelizing the problem with MPI. Here we see nearly perfect strong and weak scaling for uniform data, and improve strong scaling for realistic data by repartitioning the problem to process mapping. By utilizing GPUs available on most modern workstations, we observe an additional 1.3x speedup over the serial C implementation on the first use of the method. We typically repeatedly evaluate theoretical dispersion curves as part of an optimization procedure, and on the GPU the kernel can be cached for faster reuse on later runs. We observe a 3.2x speedup on the cached GPU runs compared to the serial C runs. This work is the first open-source parallel or GPU-accelerated software tool for MASW imaging, and should enable geotechnical engineers to fully utilize all computer hardware at their disposal.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Pairwise Sequence Alignment Library

Vector extensions, such as SSE, have been part of the x86 CPU since the 1990s, with applications in graphics, signal processing, and scientific applications. Although many algorithms and applications can naturally benefit from automatic vectorization techniques, there are still many that are difficult to vectorize due to their dependence on irregular data structures, dense branch operations, or data dependencies. Sequence alignment, one of the most widely used operations in bioinformatics workflows, has a computational footprint that features complex data dependencies. The trend of widening vector registers adversely affects the state-of-the-art sequence alignment algorithm based on striped data layouts. Therefore, a novel SIMD implementation of a parallel scan-based sequence alignment algorithm that can better exploit wider SIMD units was implemented as part of the Parallel Sequence Alignment Library (parasail). Parasail features: Reference implementations of all known vectorized sequence alignment approaches. Implementations of Smith Waterman (SW), semi-global (SG), and Needleman Wunsch (NW) sequence alignment algorithms. Implementations across all modern CPU instruction sets including AVX2 and KNC. Language interfaces for C/C++ and Python.

Jeff Daily, PNNL↗

Pairwise Sequence Alignment Library

Vector extensions, such as SSE, have been part of the x86 CPU since the 1990s, with applications in graphics, signal processing, and scientific applications. Although many algorithms and applications can naturally benefit from automatic vectorization techniques, there are still many that are difficult to vectorize due to their dependence on irregular data structures, dense branch operations, or data dependencies. Sequence alignment, one of the most widely used operations in bioinformatics workflows, has a computational footprint that features complex data dependencies. The trend of widening vector registers adversely affects the state-of-the-art sequence alignment algorithm based on striped data layouts. Therefore, a novel SIMD implementation of a parallel scan-based sequence alignment algorithm that can better exploit wider SIMD units was implemented as part of the Parallel Sequence Alignment Library (parasail). Parasail features: Reference implementations of all known vectorized sequence alignment approaches. Implementations of Smith Waterman (SW), semi-global (SG), and Needleman Wunsch (NW) sequence alignment algorithms. Implementations across all modern CPU instruction sets including AVX2 and KNC. Language interfaces for C/C++ and Python.

Jeff Daily, PNNL↗

Algorithms and analyses for stochastic optimization for turbofan noise reduction using parallel reduced-order modeling

Simulation-based optimization of acoustic liner design in a turbofan engine nacelle for noise reduction purposes can dramatically reduce the cost and time needed for experimental designs. Because uncertainties are inevitable in the design process, a stochastic optimization algorithm is posed based on the conditional value-at-risk measure so that an ideal acoustic liner impedance is determined that is robust in the presence of uncertainties. A parallel reduced-order modeling framework is developed that dramatically improves the computational efficiency of the stochastic optimization solver for a realistic nacelle geometry. The reduced stochastic optimization solver takes less than 500 s to execute. Additionally, well-posedness and finite element error analyses of the state system and optimization problem are provided.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Parallel computing for power system climate resiliency: Solving a large-scale stochastic capacity expansion problem with mpi-sppy

Here we propose a nodal stochastic generation and transmission expansion planning model that incorporates the output from high-resolution global climate models through load and generation availability scenarios. We implement our model in Pyomo and perform computational studies on a realistically-sized test case of the California electric grid in a high performance computing environment. We propose model reformulations and algorithm tuning to efficiently solve this large problem using a variant of the Progressive Hedging Algorithm. We utilize the parallelization capabilities and overall versatility of mpi-sppy, exploiting its hub-and-spoke architecture to concurrently obtain inner and outer bounds on an optimal expansion plan. Initial results show that instances with 360 representative days on a system with over 8,000 buses can be solved to within 5% of optimality in under 4 h of wall clock time, a first step towards solving a large-scale power system expansion planning problem across a wide range of climate-informed operational scenarios.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

On the Impact of Widening Vector Registers on Sequence Alignment

Vector extensions, such as SSE, have been part of the x86 since the 1990s, with applications in graphics, signal processing, and scientific applications. Although many algorithms and applications can naturally benefit from automatic vectorization techniques, there are still many that are difficult to vectorize due to their dependence on irregular data structures, dense branch operations, or data dependencies. Sequence alignment, one of the most widely used operations in bioinformatics workflows, has a computational footprint that features complex data dependencies. In this paper, we demonstrate that the trend of widening vector registers adversely affects the state-of-the-art sequence alignment algorithm based on striped data layouts. We present a practically efficient SIMD implementation of a parallel scan based sequence alignment algorithm that can better exploit wider SIMD units. We conduct comprehensive workload and use case analyses to characterize the relative behavior of the striped and scan approaches and identify the best choice of algorithm based on input length and SIMD width.

Needleman-Wunsch↗

The RAJA Portability Layer: Overview and Status

As computer architectures become increasingly complex and diverse, application developers face difficult challenges to achieve high performance while maintaining code portability. The problem is especially acute for large ASC multiphysics codes. Efficient parallel execution often requires tuning algorithms and data access to match processor and memory system constraints. Changing compiler directives and parallel programming model constructs on thousands of individual loops in a large code is disruptive and unwieldy. RAJA is a programming approach that we have been developing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to encapsulate platform-specific concerns, related to both hardware and parallel programming models. The RAJA abstraction layer simplifies porting C/C++ codes to various programming models and architectures by reducing effort and developer disruption. In this report, we motivate and describe key aspects of RAJA. We also present a preliminary assessment of RAJA based on exploration in three ASC hydrodynamics codes at LLNL, which was one part of a three-part ASC Level 2 milestone, completed in September 2014.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Data intensive computing at Sandia.

Data-Intensive Computing is parallel computing where you design your algorithms and your software around efficient access and traversal of a data set; where hardware requirements are dictated by data size as much as by desired run times usually distilling compact results from massive data.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

GPU Accelerated Event Detection Algorithm

Smart grid external require new algorithmic approaches as well as parallel formulations. One of the critical components is the prediction of changes and detection of anomalies within the power grid. The state-of-the-art algorithms are not suited to handle the demands of streaming data analysis. (i) need for events detection algorithms that can scale with the size of data, (ii) need for algorithms that can not only handle multi dimensional nature of the data, but also model both spatial and temporal dependencies in the data, which, for the most part, are highly nonlinear, (iii) need for algorithms that can operate in an online fashion with streaming data. The GAEDA code is a new online anomaly detection techniques that take into account spatial, temporal, multi-dimensional aspects of the data set. The basic idea behind the proposed approach is to (a) to convert a multi-dimensional sequence into a univariate time series that captures the changes between successive windows extracted from the original sequence using singular value decomposition (SVD), and then (b) to apply known anomaly detection techniques for univariate time series. A key challenge for the proposed approach is to make the algorithm scalable to huge datasets by adopting techniques from perturbation theory, incremental SVD analysis. We used recent advances in tensor decomposition techniques which reduce computational complexity to monitor the change between successive windows and detect anomalies in the same manner as described above. Therefore we propose to develop the parallel solutions on many core systems such as GPUs, because these algorithms involve lot of numerical operations and are highly data-parallelizable.

Source record↗

GVT Algorithms and Discrete Event Dynamics on 128K+ Processor Cores

Parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) represents a class of codes that are challenging to scale to large number of processors due to tight global timestamp-ordering and fine-grained event execution. One of the critical factors in scaling PDES is the efficiency of the underlying global virtual time (GVT) algorithm needed for correctness of parallel execution and speed of progress. Although many GVT algorithms have been proposed previously, few have been proposed for scalable asynchronous execution and none customized to exploit one-sided communication. Moreover, the detailed performance effects of actual GVT algorithm implementations on large platforms are unknown. Here, three major GVT algorithms intended for scalable execution on high-performance systems are studied: (1) a synchronous GVT algorithm that affords ease of implementation, (2) an asynchronous GVT algorithm that is more complex to implement but can relieve blocking latencies, and (3) a variant of the asynchronous GVT algorithm, proposed and studied for the first time here, to exploit one-sided communication in extant supercomputing platforms. Performance results are presented of implementations of these algorithms on over 64,000 cores of a Cray XT5 system, exercised on a range of parameters: optimistic and conservative synchronization, fine- to medium-grained event computation, synthetic and non-synthetic applications, and different lookahead values. Performance of tens of billions of events executed per second are registered, exceeding the speeds of any known PDES engine, and showing asynchronous GVT algorithms to outperform state-of-the-art synchronous GVT algorithms. Detailed PDES-specific runtime metrics are presented to further the understanding of tightly-coupled discrete event execution dynamics on massively parallel platforms.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Hybrid Parallelism for Volume Rendering on Large, Multi-core Systems

This work studies the performance and scalability characteristics of"hybrid'"parallel programming and execution as applied to raycasting volume rendering -- a staple visualization algorithm -- on a large, multi-core platform. Historically, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become the de-facto standard for parallel programming and execution on modern parallel systems. As the computing industry trends towards multi-core processors, with four- and six-core chips common today and 128-core chips coming soon, we wish to better understand how algorithmic and parallel programming choices impact performance and scalability on large, distributed-memory multi-core systems. Our findings indicate that the hybrid-parallel implementation, at levels of concurrency ranging from 1,728 to 216,000, performs better, uses a smaller absolute memory footprint, and consumes less communication bandwidth than the traditional, MPI-only implementation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Hybrid Parallelism for Volume Rendering on Large, Multi-core Systems

This work studies the performance and scalability characteristics of"hybrid" parallel programming and execution as applied to raycasting volume rendering -- a staple visualization algorithm -- on a large, multi-core platform. Historically, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become the de-facto standard for parallel programming and execution on modern parallel systems. As the computing industry trends towards multi-core processors, with four- and six-core chips common today and 128-core chips coming soon, we wish to better understand how algorithmic and parallel programming choices impact performance and scalability on large, distributed-memory multi-core systems. Our findings indicate that the hybrid-parallel implementation, at levels of concurrency ranging from 1,728 to 216,000, performs better, uses a smaller absolute memory footprint, and consumes less communication bandwidth than the traditional, MPI-only implementation.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

EXAGRAPH: Graph and combinatorial methods for enabling exascale applications

Combinatorial algorithms in general and graph algorithms in particular play a critical enabling role in numerous scientific applications. However, the irregular memory access nature of these algorithms makes them one of the hardest algorithmic kernels to implement on parallel systems. With tens of billions of hardware threads and deep memory hierarchies, the exascale computing systems in particular pose extreme challenges in scaling graph algorithms. The codesign center on combinatorial algorithms, ExaGraph, was established to design and develop methods and techniques for efficient implementation of key combinatorial (graph) algorithms chosen from a diverse set of exascale applications. Algebraic and combinatorial methods have a complementary role in the advancement of computational science and engineering, including playing an enabling role on each other. In this paper, we survey the algorithmic and software development activities performed under the auspices of ExaGraph from both a combinatorial and an algebraic perspective. In particular, we detail our recent efforts in porting the algorithms to manycore accelerator (GPU) architectures. We also provide a brief survey of the applications that have benefited from the scalable implementations of different combinatorial algorithms to enable scientific discovery at scale. We believe that several applications will benefit from the algorithmic and software tools developed by the ExaGraph team.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Extracting SIMD Parallelism from Recursive Task-Parallel Programs

The pursuit of computational efficiency has led to the proliferation of throughput-oriented hardware, from GPUs to increasingly wide vector units on commodity processors and accelerators. This hardware is designed to efficiently execute data-parallel computations in a vectorized manner. However, many algorithms are more naturally expressed as divide-and-conquer, recursive, task-parallel computations. In the absence of data parallelism, it seems that such algorithms are not well suited to throughput-oriented architectures. This paper presents a set of novel code transformations that expose the data parallelism latent in recursive, task- parallel programs. These transformations facilitate straightforward vectorization of task-parallel programs on commodity hardware. We also present scheduling policies that maintain high utilization of vector resources while limiting space usage. Across several task-parallel benchmarks, we demonstrate both efficient vector resource utilization and substantial speedup on chips using Intel’s SSE4.2 vector units, as well as accelerators using Intel’s AVX512 units. We then show through rigorous sampling that, in practice, our vectorization techniques are effective for a much larger class of programs.

Recursive Programs, task parallelism, vectorizatio↗

Efficient Execution of Recursive Programs on Commodity Vector Hardware

The pursuit of computational efficiency has led to the proliferation of throughput-oriented hardware, from GPUs to increasingly-wide vector units on commodity processors and accelerators. This hardware is designed to efficiently execute data-parallel computations in a vectorized manner. However, many algorithms are more naturally expressed as divide-and-conquer, recursive, task-parallel computations; in the absence of data parallelism, it seems that such algorithms are not well-suited to throughput-oriented architectures. This paper presents a set of novel code transformations that expose the data-parallelism latent in recursive, task-parallel programs. These transformations facilitate straightforward vectorization of task-parallel programs on commodity hardware. We also present scheduling policies that maintain high utilization of vector resources while limiting space usage. Across several task-parallel benchmarks, we demonstrate both efficient vector resource utilization and substantial speedup on chips using Intel's SSE4.2 vector units as well as accelerators using Intel's AVX512 units.

resursion↗