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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.

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At least 163 records · Page 9

Newly Released Capabilities in the Distributed-Memory SuperLU Sparse Direct Solver

We present the new features available in the recent release of SuperLU_DIST, Version 8.1.1. SuperLU_DIST is a distributed-memory parallel sparse direct solver. The new features include (1) a 3D communication-avoiding algorithm framework that trades off inter-process communication for selective memory duplication, (2) multi-GPU support for both NVIDIA GPUs and AMD GPUs, and (3) mixed-precision routines that perform single-precision LU factorization and double-precision iterative refinement. Apart from the algorithm improvements, we also modernized the software build system to use CMake and Spack package installation tools to simplify the installation procedure. Throughout the article, we describe in detail the pertinent performance-sensitive parameters associated with each new algorithmic feature, show how they are exposed to the users, and give general guidance of how to set these parameters. We illustrate that the solver’s performance both in time and memory can be greatly improved after systematic tuning of the parameters, depending on the input sparse matrix and underlying hardware.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A balanced submatrix merging algorithm for multiprocessor architectures

In this article, a parallel algorithm which applies Givens rotations to selectively annihilate k(k + 1)/2 nonzero elements from two k x n(k not more than n) upper trapezoidal submatrices is described. The new algorithm is suitable for implementation on either a pair of directly connected local-memory processors or two clusters of multiple tightly-coupled processors. Analyses show that in both cases the proposed algorithms achieve optimal speed-up by balancing the work load distribution and masking interprocessor or intercluster communication by computation if k is much small than n. In the context of solving large scale least squares problems, this submatrix merging step is repetitively needed during the entire computation and, furthermore, there are usually many pairs of such submatrices to be merged with each submatrix stored in the memory of a processor or a cluster of processors. The proposed algorithm can be applied to each pair of submatrices concurrently, and thus parallelizes an important step in solving the least squares problems.

Chu, Eleanor↗

CG-Kit: Code Generation Toolkit for performant and maintainable variants of source code applied to Flash-X hydrodynamics simulations

CG-Kit is a new Code Generation tool-Kit that we have developed as a part of the solution for portability and maintainability for multiphysics computing applications. The development of CG-Kit is rooted in the urgent need created by the shifting landscape of high-performance computing platforms and the algorithmic complexities of a particular large-scale multiphysics application: Flash-X. To efficiently use computing resources on a heterogeneous node, an application must have a map of computation to resources and a mechanism to move the data and computation to the resources according to the map. Most existing performance portability solutions are focussed on abstracting the expression of computations so that a unified source code can be specialized to run on different resources. However, such an approach is insufficient for a code like Flash-X, which has a multitude of code components that can be assembled in various permutations and combinations to form different instances of applications. Similar challenges apply to any code that has composability, where a single specified way of apportioning work among devices may not be optimal. Additionally, use cases arise where the optimal control flow of computation may differ for different devices while the underlying numerics remain identical. This combination leads to unique challenges including handling an existing large code base in Fortran and/or C/C++, subdivision of code into a great variety of units supporting a wide range of physics and numerical methods, different parallelization techniques for distributed and shared memory systems and accelerator devices, and heterogeneity of computing platforms requiring coexisting variants of parallel algorithms. All of these challenges demand that scientific software developers apply existing knowledge about domain applications, algorithms, and computing platforms to determine custom abstractions and granularity for code generation. There is a critical lack of tools to tackle those problems. CG-Kit is designed to fill this gap by providing a user with the ability to express their desired control flow and computation-to-resource map in the form a pseudocode-like recipe. It consists of standalone tools that can be combined into highly specific and, we argue, highly effective portability and maintainability toolchains. Here we present the design of our new tools: parametrized source trees, control flow graphs, and recipes. The tools are implemented in Python. They are agnostic to the programming language of the source code targeted for code generation. In conclusion, we demonstrate the capabilities of the toolkit with two examples, first, multithreaded variants of the basic AXPY operation, and second, variants of parallel algorithms within a hydrodynamics solver, called Spark, from Flash-X that operates on block-structured adaptive meshes.

Algorithmic portability↗

Relaxing consistency in recoverable distributed shared memory

Relaxed memory consistency models tolerate increased memory access latency in both hardware and software distributed shared memory systems. In recoverable systems, relaxing consistency has the added benefit of reducing the number of checkpoints needed to avoid rollback propagation. In this paper, we introduce new checkpointing algorithms that take advantage of relaxed consistency to reduce the performance overhead of checkpointing. We also introduce a scheme based on lazy relaxed consistency, that reduces both checkpointing overhead and the overhead of avoiding error propagation in systems with error latency. We use multiprocessor address traces to evaluate the relaxed consistency approach to checkpointing with distributed shared memory.

Janssens, Bob↗

Relaxing consistency in recoverable distributed shared memory

Relaxed memory consistency models have recently been proposed to tolerate memory access latency in both hardware and software distributed shared memory systems. In recoverable shared memory multiprocessors, relaxing consistency has the added benefit of reducing the number of checkpoints needed to avoid rollback propagation. In this paper, we introduce new checkpointing algorithms that take advantage of relaxed consistency to reduce the performance overhead of checkpointing. We also introduce a scheme based on lazy relaxed consistency, that reduces both checkpointing overhead and the overhead of avoiding error propagation in systems with error latency. Multiprocessor address traces are used to evaluate the relaxed consistency approach to checkpointing with distributed shared memory.

Janssens, Bob↗

A Hybrid Optimization and Deep Learning Algorithm for Cyber-Resilient DER Control

With the proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) in the distribution grid, it is a challenge to effectively control a large number of DERs resilient to the communication and security disruptions, as well as to provide the online grid services, such as voltage regulation and virtual power plant (VPP) dispatch. To this end, a hybrid feedback-based optimization algorithm along with deep learning forecasting technique is proposed to specifically address the cyber-related issues. The online decentralized feedback-based DER optimization control requires timely, accurate voltage measurement from the grid. However, in practice such information may not be received by the control center or even be corrupted. Therefore, the long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning algorithm is employed to forecast delayed/missed/attacked messages with high accuracy. The IEEE 37-node feeder with high penetration of PV systems is used to validate the efficiency of the proposed hybrid algorithm. The results show that 1) the LSTM-forecasted lost voltage can effectively improve the performance of the DER control algorithm in the practical cyber-physical architecture; and 2) the LSTM forecasting strategy outperforms other strategies of using previous message and skipping dual parameter update.

cyber-resilient algorithm↗

Application of Local Discretization Methods in the NASA Finite-Volume General Circulation Model

We present the basic ideas of the dynamics system of the finite-volume General Circulation Model developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for climate simulations and other applications in meteorology. The dynamics of this model is designed with emphases on conservative and monotonic transport, where the property of Lagrangian conservation is used to maintain the physical consistency of the computational fluid for long-term simulations. As the model benefits from the noise-free solutions of monotonic finite-volume transport schemes, the property of Lagrangian conservation also partly compensates the accuracy of transport for the diffusion effects due to the treatment of monotonicity. By faithfully maintaining the fundamental laws of physics during the computation, this model is able to achieve sufficient accuracy for the global consistency of climate processes. Because the computing algorithms are based on local memory, this model has the advantage of efficiency in parallel computation with distributed memory. Further research is yet desirable to reduce the diffusion effects of monotonic transport for better accuracy, and to mitigate the limitation due to fast-moving gravity waves for better efficiency.

Yeh, Kao-San↗

Slices: A Scalable Partitioner for Finite Element Meshes

A parallel partitioner for partitioning unstructured finite element meshes on distributed memory architectures is developed. The element based partitioner can handle mixtures of different element types. All algorithms adopted in the partitioner are scalable, including a communication template for unpredictable incoming messages, as shown in actual timing measurements.

partitioner finite element meshes parallel computi↗

Semi-automatic process partitioning for parallel computation

On current multiprocessor architectures one must carefully distribute data in memory in order to achieve high performance. Process partitioning is the operation of rewriting an algorithm as a collection of tasks, each operating primarily on its own portion of the data, to carry out the computation in parallel. A semi-automatic approach to process partitioning is considered in which the compiler, guided by advice from the user, automatically transforms programs into such an interacting task system. This approach is illustrated with a picture processing example written in BLAZE, which is transformed into a task system maximizing locality of memory reference.

Koelbel, Charles↗

Three-Dimensional High-Lift Analysis Using a Parallel Unstructured Multigrid Solver

A directional implicit unstructured agglomeration multigrid solver is ported to shared and distributed memory massively parallel machines using the explicit domain-decomposition and message-passing approach. Because the algorithm operates on local implicit lines in the unstructured mesh, special care is required in partitioning the problem for parallel computing. A weighted partitioning strategy is described which avoids breaking the implicit lines across processor boundaries, while incurring minimal additional communication overhead. Good scalability is demonstrated on a 128 processor SGI Origin 2000 machine and on a 512 processor CRAY T3E machine for reasonably fine grids. The feasibility of performing large-scale unstructured grid calculations with the parallel multigrid algorithm is demonstrated by computing the flow over a partial-span flap wing high-lift geometry on a highly resolved grid of 13.5 million points in approximately 4 hours of wall clock time on the CRAY T3E.

Mavriplis, Dimitri J.↗

Extreme Scale De Novo Metagenome Assembly

Metagenome assembly is the process of transforming a set of short, overlapping, and potentially erroneous DNA segments from environmental samples into the accurate representation of the underlying microbiomes's genomes. State-of-the-art tools require big shared memory machines and cannot handle contemporary metagenome datasets that exceed Terabytes in size. In this paper, we introduce the MetaHipMer pipeline, a high-quality and high-performance metagenome assembler that employs an iterative de Bruijn graph approach. MetaHipMer leverages a specialized scaffolding algorithm that produces long scaffolds and accommodates the idiosyncrasies of metagenomes. MetaHipMer is end-to-end parallelized using the Unified Parallel C language and therefore can run seamlessly on shared and distributed-memory systems. Experimental results show that MetaHipMer matches or outperforms the state-of-the-art tools in terms of accuracy. Ultimately, MetaHipMer scales efficiently to large concurrencies and is able to assemble previously intractable grand challenge metagenomes. We demonstrate the unprecedented capability of MetaHipMer by computing the first full assembly of the Twitchell Wetlands dataset, consisting of 7.5 billion reads - size 2.6 TBytes.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An Adaptive Flow Solver for Air-Borne Vehicles Undergoing Time-Dependent Motions/Deformations

This report describes a concurrent Euler flow solver for flows around complex 3-D bodies. The solver is based on a cell-centered finite volume methodology on 3-D unstructured tetrahedral grids. In this algorithm, spatial discretization for the inviscid convective term is accomplished using an upwind scheme. A localized reconstruction is done for flow variables which is second order accurate. Evolution in time is accomplished using an explicit three-stage Runge-Kutta method which has second order temporal accuracy. This is adapted for concurrent execution using another proven methodology based on concurrent graph abstraction. This solver operates on heterogeneous network architectures. These architectures may include a broad variety of UNIX workstations and PCs running Windows NT, symmetric multiprocessors and distributed-memory multi-computers. The unstructured grid is generated using commercial grid generation tools. The grid is automatically partitioned using a concurrent algorithm based on heat diffusion. This results in memory requirements that are inversely proportional to the number of processors. The solver uses automatic granularity control and resource management techniques both to balance load and communication requirements, and deal with differing memory constraints. These ideas are again based on heat diffusion. Results are subsequently combined for visualization and analysis using commercial CFD tools. Flow simulation results are demonstrated for a constant section wing at subsonic, transonic, and a supersonic case. These results are compared with experimental data and numerical results of other researchers. Performance results are under way for a variety of network topologies.

Singh, Jatinder↗

Are Lock-Free Concurrent Algorithms Practically Wait-Free?

Lock-free concurrent algorithms guarantee that some concurrent operation will always make progress in a finite number of steps. Yet programmers prefer to treat concurrent code as if it were wait-free, guaranteeing that all operations always make progress. Unfortunately, designing wait-free algorithms is generally a very complex task, and the resulting algorithms are not always efficient. Although obtaining efficient wait-free algorithms has been a long-time goal for the theory community, most nonblocking commercial code is only lock-free. This article suggests a simple solution to this problem. We show that for a large class of lock-free algorithms, under scheduling conditions that approximate those found in commercial hardware architectures, lock-free algorithms behave as if they are wait-free. In other words, programmers can continue to design simple lock-free algorithms instead of complex wait-free ones, and in practice, they will get wait-free progress. Our main contribution is a new way of analyzing a general class of lock-free algorithms under a stochastic scheduler. Our analysis relates the individual performance of processes to the global performance of the system using Markov chain lifting between a complex per-process chain and a simpler system progress chain. We show that lock-free algorithms are not only wait-free with probability 1 but that in fact a general subset of lock-free algorithms can be closely bounded in terms of the average number of steps required until an operation completes. Here, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze progress conditions, typically stated in relation to a worst-case adversary, in a stochastic model capturing their expected asymptotic behavior.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Partitioning of unstructured problems for parallel processing

Many large-scale computational problems are based on unstructured computational domains. Primary examples are unstructured grid calculations based on finite volume methods in computational fluid dynamics, or structural analysis problems based on finite element approximations. The question of how to distribute such unstructured computational domains over a large number of processors in a MIMD machine with distributed memory is addressed. A graph theoretical framework for these problems is established. Based on this framework three decomposition algorithms are introduced. In particular a new decomposition algorithm is discussed, which is based on the computation of an eigenvector of the Laplacian matrix associated with the graph. Numerical comparisons on large-scale two- and three-dimensional problems demonstrate the superiority of the new spectral bisection algorithm.

Simon, H. D.↗

Boundary element analysis on vector and parallel computers

Boundary element analysis (BEA) can be characterized as a numerical technique that generally shifts the computational burden in the analysis toward numerical integration and the solution of nonsymmetric and either dense or blocked sparse systems of algebraic equations. Researchers have explored the concept that the fundamental characteristics of BEA can be exploited to generate effective implementations on vector and parallel computers. In this paper, the results of some of these investigations are discussed. The performance of overall algorithms for BEA on vector supercomputers, massively data parallel single instruction multiple data (SIMD), and relatively fine grained distributed memory multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD) computer systems is described. Some general trends and conclusions are discussed, along with indications of future developments that may prove fruitful in this regard.

Kane, J. H.↗

Avoiding Communication in Primal and Dual Block Coordinate Descent Methods

Primal and dual block coordinate descent methods are iterative methods for solving regularized and unregularized optimization problems. Distributed-memory parallel implementations of these methods have become popular in analyzing large machine learning datasets. However, existing implementations communicate at every iteration, which, on modern data center and supercomputing architectures, often dominates the cost of floating-point computation. Recent results on communication-avoiding Krylov subspace methods suggest that large speedups are possible by re-organizing iterative algorithms to avoid communication. We show how applying similar algorithmic transformations can lead to primal and dual block coordinate descent methods that only communicate every $s$ iterations---where $s$ is a tuning parameter---instead of every iteration for the regularized least-squares problem. We show that the communication-avoiding variants reduce the number of synchronizations by a factor of $s$ on distributed-memory parallel machines without altering the convergence rate and attain strong scaling speedups of up to $6.1\times$ over the “standard algorithm" on a Cray XC30 supercomputer.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

PLANC: Parallel Low-rank Approximation with Nonnegativity Constraints

In this work, we consider the problem of low-rank approximation of massive dense nonnegative tensor data, for example, to discover latent patterns in video and imaging applications. As the size of data sets grows, single workstations are hitting bottlenecks in both computation time and available memory. We propose a distributed-memory parallel computing solution to handle massive data sets, loading the input data across the memories of multiple nodes, and performing efficient and scalable parallel algorithms to compute the low-rank approximation. We present a software package called Parallel Low-rank Approximation with Nonnegativity Constraints, which implements our solution and allows for extension in terms of data (dense or sparse, matrices or tensors of any order), algorithm (e.g., from multiplicative updating techniques to alternating direction method of multipliers), and architecture (we exploit GPUs to accelerate the computation in this work). We describe our parallel distributions and algorithms, which are careful to avoid unnecessary communication and computation, show how to extend the software to include new algorithms and/or constraints, and report efficiency and scalability results for both synthetic and real-world data sets.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Implementation of a fully-balanced periodic tridiagonal solver on a parallel distributed memory architecture

While parallel computers offer significant computational performance, it is generally necessary to evaluate several programming strategies. Two programming strategies for a fairly common problem - a periodic tridiagonal solver - are developed and evaluated. Simple model calculations as well as timing results are presented to evaluate the various strategies. The particular tridiagonal solver evaluated is used in many computational fluid dynamic simulation codes. The feature that makes this algorithm unique is that these simulation codes usually require simultaneous solutions for multiple right-hand-sides (RHS) of the system of equations. Each RHS solutions is independent and thus can be computed in parallel. Thus a Gaussian elimination type algorithm can be used in a parallel computation and the more complicated approaches such as cyclic reduction are not required. The two strategies are a transpose strategy and a distributed solver strategy. For the transpose strategy, the data is moved so that a subset of all the RHS problems is solved on each of the several processors. This usually requires significant data movement between processor memories across a network. The second strategy attempts to have the algorithm allow the data across processor boundaries in a chained manner. This usually requires significantly less data movement. An approach to accomplish this second strategy in a near-perfect load-balanced manner is developed. In addition, an algorithm will be shown to directly transform a sequential Gaussian elimination type algorithm into the parallel chained, load-balanced algorithm.

Eidson, T. M.↗