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At least 19 records

TeaLeaf: A Mini-Application to Enable Design-Space Explorations for Iterative Sparse Linear Solvers

Iterative sparse linear solvers are an important class of algorithm in high performance computing, and form a crucial component of many scientific codes. As intra and inter node parallelism continues to increase rapidly, the design of new, scalable solvers which can target next generation architectures becomes increasingly important. In this work we present TeaLeaf, a recent mini-app constructed to explore design space choices for highly scalable solvers. We then use TeaLeaf to compare the standard CG algorithm with a Chebyshev Polynomially Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (CPPCG) iterative sparse linear solver. CPPCG is a communication-avoiding algorithm, requiring less global communication than previous approaches. TeaLeaf includes support for many-core processors, such as GPUs and Xeon Phi, and we include strong-scaling results across a range of world-leading Petascale supercomputers, including Titan and Piz Daint.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Optimal Power Flow Derived Sparse Linear Solver Benchmarks

Due to the changing nature of the power grid, it is increasingly important to be able to solve a high-fidelity optimal power-flow models on large power networks. This high-fidelity problem, called AC Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF), is a nonlinear, nonconvex optimization problem. One of the few reliable ways of solving such a problem is interior point methods. These methods result in sparse linear systems where the coefficient matrix is symmetric, indefinite and nearly always ill-conditioned. As such, they are particularly challenging for sparse linear solvers and represent a considerable computational bottleneck in solving the ACOPF problem. In this paper, we introduce a repository of linear systems captured from ACOPF problems when solved by the open-source optimizer IPOPT. These matrices are meant to be used as a test suite for sparse linear solver development.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Sparse Linear Solvers for Large-scale Electromagnetic Transient Simulations

Linear solvers form the basis for electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulations. There is a need to speed up EMT simulations as larger regions are analyzed using EMT simulations. For the same, the performance of linear solvers plays an important role. Exploiting the sparsity of the matrices generated in EMT simulations could assist with speed-up. Scalability is also crucial as power grids expand, demanding solutions capable of accommodating the increasing system size. Recent studies from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) increasingly emphasize that EMT simulation models of the power grid will grow larger with the inclusion of power electronics components. Parallelisms in sparsity patterns exploit modern central processing units (CPUs), multi-core CPUs, and graphics processing units (GPUs) architectures in sparse solver designs. Therefore, this paper explores publicly available existing linear solvers and investigates their efficiency in large-scale power grid simulations. A large-scale power grid is developed by increasing the size of the IEEE 39 bus test system to up to 39000 bus systems.

Hsu, Kuan-Chieh↗

GPU-resident sparse direct linear solvers for alternating current optimal power flow analysis

Integrating renewable resources within the transmission grid at a wide scale poses significant challenges for economic dispatch as it requires analysis with more optimization parameters, constraints, and sources of uncertainty. This motivates the investigation of more efficient computational methods, especially those for solving the underlying linear systems, which typically take more than half of the overall computation time. In this paper, we present our work on sparse linear solvers that take advantage of hardware accelerators, such as graphical processing units (GPUs), and improve the overall performance when used within economic dispatch computations. We treat the problems as sparse, which allows for faster execution but also makes the implementation of numerical methods more challenging. We present the first GPU-native sparse direct solver that can execute on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. We demonstrate significant performance improvements when using high-performance linear solvers within alternating current optimal power flow (ACOPF) analysis. Furthermore, we demonstrate the feasibility of getting significant performance improvements by executing the entire computation on GPU-based hardware. Finally, we identify outstanding research issues and opportunities for even better utilization of heterogeneous systems, including those equipped with GPUs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Highly scalable distributed-memory sparse triangular solution algorithms.

This paper presents a highly efficient distributed-memory parallel sparse triangular solver. The triangular solution phase is often performed following factorization phase in the sparse linear solvers and has become increasingly computa­tionally expensive for direct solvers with many right hand sides (RHSs) or preconditioned iterative solvers. However, the low arithmetic intensity and sequential nature of the triangular solve algorithm pose performance challenges for its large-scale distributed-memory parallelization. In this work, we propose several strategies to enhance scalability of an algorithm with 2D block cyclic process layout. First, an asynchronous binary-tree-based communication scheme implemented via non-blocking MPI functions is leveraged to broadcast partial solutions and reduce partial updates among a subset of processes for each block column and row of the triangular matrix, respectively. This scheme reduces message latency, improves communication load balance and significantly accelerates asynchronous execution of the triangular solve. In addition, efficient BLAS operations and threading implementations are exploited to accelerate local computations and further reduce process idle time. The proposed strategies are implemented in SuperLU_DIST and numerical experiments show up to 4.4x improvement with one right-hand side and up to 6.1x improvement with 50 right- hand sides on 4096 processes, compared to the current release. This is the first time that sparse triangular solution is demonstrated strong scaling on more than 4000 cores.

Liu, Yang↗

The Generalized Green’s function Cluster Expansion: A Python package for simulating polarons

We present an efficient implementation of the Generalized Green’s function Cluster Expansion (GGCE), which is a new method for computing the ground-state properties and dynamics of polarons (single electrons coupled to lattice vibrations) in model electron-phonon systems. The GGCE works at arbitrary temperature and is well suited for a variety of electron-phonon couplings, including, but not limited to, site and bond Holstein and Peierls (Su-SchriefferHeeger) couplings, and couplings to multiple phonon modes with different energy scales and coupling strengths. Quick calculations can be performed efficiently on a laptop using solvers from NumPy and SciPy, or in parallel at scale using the PETSc sparse linear solver engine.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Solver for hardware based computing

Full-AC load flow constitutes a core computation in power system analysis. A performance gain with a hardware implementation of a sparse-linear solver using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is achieved by use of a DC network emulation of the power system bus. Analog Behavioral Models (ABMs) are used in an efficient strategy for designing analog emulation engines for large-scale power system computation. A generator model is also developed using analog circuits for load flow emulation for power system analysis to reduce computation time. The generator model includes reconfigurable parameters using operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs). The circuit module is used with other reconfigurable circuits, i.e., transmission lines and loads.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Parallel interior-point solver for block-structured nonlinear programs on SIMD/GPU architectures

Here, we investigate how to port the standard interior-point method to new exascale architectures for block-structured nonlinear programs with state equations. Computationally, we decompose the interior-point algorithm into two successive operations: the evaluation of the derivatives and the solution of the associated Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) linear system. Our method accelerates both operations using two levels of parallelism. First, we distribute the computations on multiple processes using coarse parallelism. Second, each process uses SIMD/GPU accelerators locally to accelerate the operations using fine-grained parallelism. The KKT system is reduced by eliminating the inequalities and the state variables from the corresponding equations. We demonstrate our method's capability on the supercomputer Polaris, a testbed for the future exascale Aurora system. Each node is equipped with four GPUs, a setup amenable to our two-level approach. Our experiments on the stochastic optimal power flow problem show that the reduction method is 50x faster than the sparse linear solver HSL MA57 running in serial on the CPU, and 6x faster than Pardiso running in parallel on CPU on the same number of processes.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Reducing communication in algebraic multigrid with multi-step node aware communication

Algebraic multigrid (AMG) is often viewed as a scalable [Formula: see text] solver for sparse linear systems. Yet, AMG lacks parallel scalability due to increasingly large costs associated with communication, both in the initial construction of a multigrid hierarchy and in the iterative solve phase. This work introduces a parallel implementation of AMG that reduces the cost of communication, yielding improved parallel scalability. It is common in Message Passing Interface (MPI), particularly in the MPI-everywhere approach, to arrange inter-process communication, so that communication is transported regardless of the location of the send and receive processes. Performance tests show notable differences in the cost of intra- and internode communication, motivating a restructuring of communication. In this case, the communication schedule takes advantage of the less costly intra-node communication, reducing both the number and the size of internode messages. Node-centric communication extends to the range of components in both the setup and solve phase of AMG, yielding an increase in the weak and strong scaling of the entire method.

Computer Science↗

Porting the Nonlinear Optimization Library HiOp to Accelerator-Based Hardware Architectures

While interior point method has been the centerpiece of nonlinear programming tools used in science and engineering, its reliance on linear solvers that can tackle sparse symmetric indefinite and highly ill-conditioned problems made it difficult to implement it effectively on hardware accelerators. HiOp optimization package attempts to provide an implementation of the interior point method suitable for hardware accelerators by compressing the original sparse problem to produce an underlying linear problem that is dense and of manageable size. Implementations of dense linear solvers are more mature and utilize hardware accelerators better than their sparse counterparts. There is a number of important domain problems, such as optimal power flow analysis for power grids, where the sparse problem can be effectively compressed and deploying dense linear solver within the interior point method can improve performance. Here we describe a portable implementation of HiOp optimization engine, which uses a linear solver from Magma library and runs entirely on hardware accelerators. To compress the problem, HiOp uses customized mixed dense-sparse linear algebra. All HiOp kernels are implemented using Umpire and RAJA portability libraries. We describe details of the implementation and discuss trade-offs between performance, portability and development cost.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗