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At least 163 records · Page 9

Performance Assessment of OVERFLOW on Distributed Computing Environment

The aerodynamic computer code, OVERFLOW, with a multi-zone overset grid feature, has been parallelized to enhance its performance on distributed and shared memory paradigms. Practical application benchmarks have been set to assess the efficiency of code's parallelism on high-performance architectures. The code's performance has also been experimented with in the context of the distributed computing paradigm on distant computer resources using the Information Power Grid (IPG) toolkit, Globus. Two parallel versions of the code, namely OVERFLOW-MPI and -MLP, have developed around the natural coarse grained parallelism inherent in a multi-zonal domain decomposition paradigm. The algorithm invokes a strategy that forms a number of groups, each consisting of a zone, a cluster of zones and/or a partition of a large zone. Each group can be thought of as a process with one or multithreads assigned to it and that all groups run in parallel. The -MPI version of the code uses explicit message-passing based on the standard MPI library for sending and receiving interzonal boundary data across processors. The -MLP version employs no message-passing paradigm; the boundary data is transferred through the shared memory. The -MPI code is suited for both distributed and shared memory architectures, while the -MLP code can only be used on shared memory platforms. The IPG applications are implemented by the -MPI code using the Globus toolkit. While a computational task is distributed across multiple computer resources, the parallelism can be explored on each resource alone. Performance studies are achieved with some practical aerodynamic problems with complex geometries, consisting of 2.5 up to 33 million grid points and a large number of zonal blocks. The computations were executed primarily on SGI Origin 2000 multiprocessors and on the Cray T3E. OVERFLOW's IPG applications are carried out on NASA homogeneous metacomputing machines located at three sites, Ames, Langley and Glenn. Plans for the future will exploit the distributed parallel computing capability on various homogeneous and heterogeneous resources and large scale benchmarks. Alternative IPG toolkits will be used along with sophisticated zonal grouping strategies to minimize the communication time across the computer resources.

Djomehri, M. Jahed↗

Exploiting first-class arrays in Fortran for accelerator programming

Emerging architectures for high performance computing often are well suited to a data parallel programming model. This paper presents a simple programming methodology based on existing languages and compiler tools that allows programmers to take advantage of these systems. We will work with the array features of Fortran 90 to show how this infrequently exploited, standardized language feature is easily transformed to lower level accelerator code. Our transformations are based on a mapping from Fortran 90 to C++ code with OpenCL extensions. The sheer complexity of programming for clusters of many or multi-core processors with tens of millions threads of execution make the simplicity of the data parallel model attractive. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of todays applications (especially when convolved with the increasing complexity of the hardware) and the need for portability across hardware architectures make a higher-level and simpler programming model like data parallel attractive. The goal of this work has been to exploit source-to-source transformations that allow programmers to develop and maintain programs at a high-level of abstraction, without coding to a specific hardware architecture. Furthermore these transformations allow multiple hardware architectures to be targeted without changing the high-level source. It also removes the necessity for application programmers to understand details of the accelerator architecture or to know OpenCL.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

I-GCN: A Graph Convolutional Network Accelerator with Runtime Locality Enhancement through Islandization

In this paper, we propose a novel hardware accelerator for GCN inference called I-GCN that significantly improves data locality and reduces unnecessary computation through a new online graph restructuring algorithm we refer to as islandization. The proposed algorithm finds clusters of nodes with strong internal but weak external connections. The islandization process yields two major benefits. First, by processing islands rather than individual nodes, there is better on-chip data reuse and fewer off-chip memory accesses. Second, there is less redundant computation as aggregation for common/shared neighbors in an island can be reused. The parallel search, identification, and leverage of graph islands are all handled purely in hardware at runtime working in an incremental pipelined manner. This is done without any preprocessing of the graph data or adjustment of the GCN model structure.

Geng, Tong↗

Shared Memory Parallelization of an Implicit ADI-type CFD Code

A parallelization study designed for ADI-type algorithms is presented using the OpenMP specification for shared-memory multiprocessor programming. Details of optimizations specifically addressed to cache-based computer architectures are described and performance measurements for the single and multiprocessor implementation are summarized. The paper demonstrates that optimization of memory access on a cache-based computer architecture controls the performance of the computational algorithm. A hybrid MPI/OpenMP approach is proposed for clusters of shared memory machines to further enhance the parallel performance. The method is applied to develop a new LES/DNS code, named LESTool. A preliminary DNS calculation of a fully developed channel flow at a Reynolds number of 180, Re(sub tau) = 180, has shown good agreement with existing data.

Hauser, Th.↗

PGP: parallel prokaryotic proteogenomics pipeline for MPI clusters, high-throughput batch clusters and multicore workstations

Summary: We present the first public release of our proteogenomic annotation pipeline. We have previously used our original unreleased implementation to improve the annotation of 46 diverse prokaryotic genomes by discovering novel genes, post-translational modifications and correcting the erroneous annotations by analyzing proteomic mass-spectrometry data. This public version has been redesigned to run in a wide range of parallel Linux computing environments and provided with the automated configuration, build and testing facilities for easy deployment and portability.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Event Reconstruction for Many-core Architectures using Java

Although Moore's Law remains technically valid, the performance enhancements in computing which traditionally resulted from increased CPU speeds ended years ago. Chip manufacturers have chosen to increase the number of core CPUs per chip instead of increasing clock speed. Unfortunately, these extra CPUs do not automatically result in improvements in simulation or reconstruction times. To take advantage of this extra computing power requires changing how software is written. Event reconstruction is globally serial, in the sense that raw data has to be unpacked first, channels have to be clustered to produce hits before those hits are identified as belonging to a track or shower, tracks have to be found and fit before they are vertexed, etc. However, many of the individual procedures along the reconstruction chain are intrinsically independent and are perfect candidates for optimization using multi-core architecture. Threading is perhaps the simplest approach to parallelizing a program and Java includes a powerful threading facility built into the language. We have developed a fast and flexible reconstruction package (org.lcsim) written in Java that has been used for numerous physics and detector optimization studies. In this paper we present the results of our studies on optimizing the performance of this toolkit using multiple threads on many-core architectures.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Automated Production of Movies on a Cluster of Computers

A method of accelerating and facilitating production of video and film motion-picture products, and software and generic designs of computer hardware to implement the method, are undergoing development. The method provides for automation of most of the tedious and repetitive tasks involved in editing and otherwise processing raw digitized imagery into final motion-picture products. The method was conceived to satisfy requirements, in industrial and scientific testing, for rapid processing of multiple streams of simultaneously captured raw video imagery into documentation in the form of edited video imagery and video derived data products for technical review and analysis. In the production of such video technical documentation, unlike in production of motion-picture products for entertainment, (1) it is often necessary to produce multiple video derived data products, (2) there are usually no second chances to repeat acquisition of raw imagery, (3) it is often desired to produce final products within minutes rather than hours, days, or months, and (4) consistency and quality, rather than aesthetics, are the primary criteria for judging the products. In the present method, the workflow has both serial and parallel aspects: processing can begin before all the raw imagery has been acquired, each video stream can be subjected to different stages of processing simultaneously on different computers that may be grouped into one or more cluster(s), and the final product may consist of multiple video streams. Results of processing on different computers are shared, so that workers can collaborate effectively.

Nail, Jasper↗

NWChem: Quantum Chemistry Simulations at Scale

Methods based on quantum mechanics equations have been developed since the 1930's with the purpose of accurately studying the electronic structure of molecules. However, it is only during the last two decades that intense development of new computational algorithms has opened the possibility of performing accurate simulations of challenging molecular processes with high-order many-body methods. A wealth of evidence indicates that the proper inclusion of instantaneous interactions between electrons (or the so-called electron correlation effects) is indispensable for the accurate characterization of chemical reactivity, molecular properties, and interactions of light with matter. The availability of reliable methods for benchmarking of medium-size molecular systems provides also a unique chance to propagate high-level accuracy across spatial scales through the multiscale methodologies. Some of these methods have potential to utilize computational resources in an effi*cient way since they are characterized by high numerical complexity and appropriate level of data granularity, which can be effi*ciently distributed over multi-processor architectures. The broad spectrum of coupled cluster (CC) methods falls into this class of methodologies. Several recent CC implementations clearly demonstrated the scalability of CC formalisms on architectures composed of hundreds thousand computational cores. In this context NWChem provides a collection of Tensor Contraction Engine (TCE) generated parallel implementations of various coupled cluster methods capable of taking advantage of many thousand of cores on leadership class parallel architectures.

chemistry↗

Enabling Low-Overhead HT-HPC Workflows at Extreme Scale using GNU Parallel

GNU Parallel is a versatile and powerful tool for process parallelization widely used in scientific computing. This paper demonstrates its effective application in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, particularly focusing on its scalability and efficiency in executing large-scale high-throughput high-performance computing (HT-HPC) workflows. Through real-world examples, we highlight GNU Parallel’s performance across various HPC workloads, including GPU computing, container-based workloads, and node-local NVMe storage. Our results on two leading supercomputers, OLCF’s Frontier and NERSC’s Perlmutter, showcase GNU Parallel’s rapid process dispatching ability and its capacity to maintain low overhead even at extreme scales. We explore GNU Parallel’s application in massive parallel file transfers using a scheduled Data Transfer Node (DTN) cluster, emphasizing its broad utility in diverse scientific workflows. Beyond its direct application as a viable workflow manager, GNU Parallel can be employed in conjunction with other workflow systems as a "last-mile" parallelizing driver and as a quick prototyping tool to design and extract parallel profiles from application executions. We then argue that the potential for GNU Parallel to transform workflow management at extreme scales is substantial, paving the way for more efficient and effective scientific discoveries.

Maheshwari, Ketan↗

Cluster-to-cluster data transfer with data compression over wide-area networks

The recent emergence of ultra high-speed networks up to 100 Gb/s has posed numerous challenges and has led to many investigations on efficient protocols to saturate 100 Gb/s links. However, end-to-end data transfers involve many components, not only protocols, affecting overall transfer performance. These components include disk I/O subsystem, additional computation associated with data streams, and network adapters. For example, achievable bandwidth by TCP may not be implementable if disk I/O or CPU becomes a bottleneck in end-to-end data transfer. In this paper, we first model all the system components involved in end-to-end data transfer as a graph. We then formulate the problem whose goal is to achieve maximum data transfer throughput using parallel data flows. We also propose a variable data flow GridFFP XIO stack to improve data transfer with data compression. Our contributions lie in how to optimize data transfers considering all the system components involved rather than in accurately modeling all the system components involved. Our proposed formulations and solutions are evaluated through experiments on the ESnet 100G testbed and a wide-area cluster-to-cluster testbed. The experimental results on the ESnet 100G testbed show that our approach is several times faster than Globus Online-8 x faster for datasets with many 10 MB files and 3-4 x faster for other datasets of larger size files. The experimental results on the cluster-to-cluster testbed show that our variable data flow approach is up to 4 x faster than a normal cluster data transfer.

Disk-to-Disk Transfer↗

Climate Ocean Modeling on a Beowulf Class System

With the growing power and shrinking cost of personal computers. the availability of fast ethernet interconnections, and public domain software packages, it is now possible to combine them to build desktop parallel computers (named Beowulf or PC clusters) at a fraction of what it would cost to buy systems of comparable power front supercomputer companies. This led as to build and assemble our own sys tem. specifically for climate ocean modeling. In this article, we present our experience with such a system, discuss its network performance, and provide some performance comparison data with both HP SPP2000 and Cray T3E for an ocean Model used in present-day oceanographic research.

Cheng, B. N.↗

Iso-Energy-Efficiency: An Approach to Power Constrained Parallel Computation

Future large scale high performance supercomputer systems require high energy efficiency to achieve exaflops computational power and beyond. Despite the need to understand energy efficiency in high-performance systems, there are few techniques to evaluate energy efficiency at scale. In this paper, we propose a system level iso-energy-efficiency model to analyze, evaluate and predict energy-performance of data intensive parallel applications with various execution patterns running on large scale power-aware clusters. Our analytical model can help users explore the effects of machine and application dependent characteristics on system energy efficiency and isolate efficient ways to scale system parameters (e.g. processor count, CPU power/frequency, workload size and network bandwidth) to balance energy use and performance. We derive our iso-energy-efficiency model and apply it to the NAS Parallel Benchmarks on two power-aware clusters. Our results indicate that the model accurately predicts total system energy consumption within 5% error on average for parallel applications with various execution and communication patterns. We demonstrate effective use of the model for various application contexts and in scalability decision-making.

Song, Shuaiwen↗

Parallel processing for scientific computations

The scope of this project dealt with the investigation of the requirements to support distributed computing of scientific computations over a cluster of cooperative workstations. Various experiments on computations for the solution of simultaneous linear equations were performed in the early phase of the project to gain experience in the general nature and requirements of scientific applications. A specification of a distributed integrated computing environment, DICE, based on a distributed shared memory communication paradigm has been developed and evaluated. The distributed shared memory model facilitates porting existing parallel algorithms that have been designed for shared memory multiprocessor systems to the new environment. The potential of this new environment is to provide supercomputing capability through the utilization of the aggregate power of workstations cooperating in a cluster interconnected via a local area network. Workstations, generally, do not have the computing power to tackle complex scientific applications, making them primarily useful for visualization, data reduction, and filtering as far as complex scientific applications are concerned. There is a tremendous amount of computing power that is left unused in a network of workstations. Very often a workstation is simply sitting idle on a desk. A set of tools can be developed to take advantage of this potential computing power to create a platform suitable for large scientific computations. The integration of several workstations into a logical cluster of distributed, cooperative, computing stations presents an alternative to shared memory multiprocessor systems. In this project we designed and evaluated such a system.

Alkhatib, Hasan S.↗

Quantum Monte Carlo Endstation for Petascale Computing

The major achievements enabled by QMC Endstation grant include * Performance improvement on clusters of x86 multi-core systems, especially on Cray XT systems * New and improved methods for the wavefunction optimizations * New forms of trial wavefunctions * Implementation of the full application on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA The scaling studies of QMCPACK on large-scale systems show excellent parallel efficiency up to 216K cores on Jaguarpf (Cray XT5). The GPU implementation shows speedups of 10-15x over the CPU implementation on older generation of x86. We have implemented hybrid OpenMP/MPI scheme in QMC to take advantage of multi-core shared memory processors of petascale systems. Our hybrid scheme has several advantages over the standard MPI-only scheme. * Memory optimized: large read-only data to store one-body orbitals and other shared properties to represent the trial wave function and many-body Hamiltonian can be shared among threads, which reduces the memory footprint of a large-scale problem. * Cache optimized: the data associated with an active Walker are in cache during the compute-intensive drift-diffusion process and the operations on an Walker are optimized for cache reuse. Thread-local objects are used to ensure the data affinity to a thread. * Load balanced: Walkers in an ensemble are evenly distributed among threads and MPI tasks. The two-level parallelism reduces the population imbalance among MPI tasks and reduces the number of point-to-point communications of large messages (serialized objects) for the Walker exchange. * Communication optimized: the communication overhead, especially for the collective operations necessary to determine ET and measure the properties of an ensemble, is significantly lowered by using less MPI tasks. The multiple forms of parallelism afforded by QMC algorithms make them ideal candidates for acceleration in the many-core paradigm. We presented the results of our effort to port the QMCPACK simulation code to the NVIDIA CUDA GPU platform. We restructured the CPU algorithms to express additional parallelism, minimize GPU-CPU communication, and efficiently utilize the GPU memory hierarchy. Using mixed precision on GT200 GPUs and MPI for intercommunication and load balancing, we observe typical full-application speedups of approximately 10x to 15x relative to quad-core Xeon CPUs alone, while reproducing the double-precision CPU results within statistical error. We developed an all-electron quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method for solids that does not rely on pseudopotentials, and used it to construct a primary ultra-high-pressure calibration based on the equation of state of cubic boron nitride. We computed the static contribution to the free energy with the QMC method and obtained the phonon contribution from density functional theory, yielding a high-accuracy calibration up to 900 GPa usable directly in experiment. We computed the anharmonic Raman frequency shift with QMC simulations as a function of pressure and temperature, allowing optical pressure calibration. In contrast to present experimental approaches, small systematic errors in the theoretical EOS do not increase with pressure, and no extrapolation is needed. This all-electron method is applicable to first-row solids, providing a new reference for ab initio calculations of solids and benchmarks for pseudopotential accuracy. We compared experimental and theoretical results on the momentum distribution and the quasiparticle renormalization factor in sodium. From an x-ray Compton-profile measurement of the valence-electron momentum density, we derived its discontinuity at the Fermi wavevector finding an accurate measure of the renormalization factor that we compared with quantum-Monte-Carlo and G0W0 calculations performed both on crystalline sodium and on the homogeneous electron gas. Our calculated results are in good agreement with the experiment. We have been studying the heat of formation for various Kubas complexes of molecular hydrogen on Ti(1,2)ethylene-nH2 using Diffusion Monte Carlo. This work has been started and is ongoing. We are studying systems involving 1 and 2 Ti bonding sites with up to 10 hydrogen molecules in numerous configurations. This work will establish a benchmark that will test the accuracy of density functional calculations and establish the feasibility of our methods for similar systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Distributed-Memory Parallel Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

We develop the first distributed-memory parallel implementation of Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SymNMF), a key data analytics kernel for clustering and dimensionality reduction. Our implementation includes two different algorithms for SymNMF, which give comparable results in terms of time and accuracy. The first algorithm is a parallelization of an existing sequential approach that uses solvers for non symmetric NMF. The second algorithm is a novel approach based on the Gauss-Newton method. It exploits second-order information without incurring large computational and memory costs. We evaluate the scalability of our algorithms on the Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scaling up to 128 nodes (4,096 cores) with 70% efficiency. Additionally, we demonstrate our software on an image segmentation task.

Eswar, Srinivas↗

Parallelizing the Unpacking and Clustering of Detector Data for Reconstruction of Charged Particle Tracks on Multi-core CPUs and Many-core GPUs

We present results from parallelizing the unpacking and clustering steps of the raw data from the silicon strip modules for reconstruction of charged particle tracks. Throughput is further improved by concurrently processing multiple events using nested OpenMP parallelism on CPU or CUDA streams on GPU. The new implementation along with earlier work in developing a parallelized and vectorized implementation of the combinatoric Kalman filter algorithm has enabled efficient global reconstruction of the entire event on modern computer architectures. We demonstrate the performance of the new implementation on Intel Xeon and NVIDIA GPU architectures.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Software for Verifying Image-Correlation Tie Points

A computer program enables assessment of the quality of tie points in the image-correlation processes of the software described in the immediately preceding article. Tie points are computed in mappings between corresponding pixels in the left and right images of a stereoscopic pair. The mappings are sometimes not perfect because image data can be noisy and parallax can cause some points to appear in one image but not the other. The present computer program relies on the availability of a left- right correlation map in addition to the usual right left correlation map. The additional map must be generated, which doubles the processing time. Such increased time can now be afforded in the data-processing pipeline, since the time for map generation is now reduced from about 60 to 3 minutes by the parallelization discussed in the previous article. Parallel cluster processing time, therefore, enabled this better science result. The first mapping is typically from a point (denoted by coordinates x,y) in the left image to a point (x',y') in the right image. The second mapping is from (x',y') in the right image to some point (x",y") in the left image. If (x,y) and(x",y") are identical, then the mapping is considered perfect. The perfect-match criterion can be relaxed by introducing an error window that admits of round-off error and a small amount of noise. The mapping procedure can be repeated until all points in each image not connected to points in the other image are eliminated, so that what remains are verified correlation data.

Klimeck, Gerhard↗

Cross-scale efficient tensor contractions for coupled cluster computations through multiple programming model backends

Coupled-cluster methods provide highly accurate models of molecular structure through explicit numerical calculation of tensors representing the correlation between electrons. These calculations are dominated by a sequence of tensor contractions, motivating the development of numerical libraries for such operations. While based on matrix–matrix multiplication, these libraries are specialized to exploit symmetries in the molecular structure and in electronic interactions, and thus reduce the size of the tensor representation and the complexity of contractions. The resulting algorithms are irregular and their parallelization has been previously achieved via the use of dynamic scheduling or specialized data decompositions. We introduce our efforts to extend the Libtensor framework to work in the distributed memory environment in a scalable and energy-efficient manner. We achieve up to 240× speedup compared with the optimized shared memory implementation of Libtensor. We attain scalability to hundreds of thousands of compute cores on three distributed-memory architectures (Cray XC30 and XC40, and IBM Blue Gene/Q), and on a heterogeneous GPU-CPU system (Cray XK7). As the bottlenecks shift from being compute-bound DGEMM's to communication-bound collectives as the size of the molecular system scales, we adopt two radically different parallelization approaches for handling load-imbalance, tasking and bulk synchronous models. Nevertheless, we preserve a unified interface to both programming models to maintain the productivity of computational quantum chemists.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗