Build Times on Modern Heterogeneous Systems: Steps towards a faster future
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Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Doerfert, Johannes.
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Software developers must adapt to keep up with the changing capabilities of platforms so that they can utilize the power of High-Performance Computers (HPC), including exascale systems. OpenMP, a directive-based parallel programming model, allows developers to include directives to existing C, C++, or Fortran code to allow node level parallelism without compromising performance. This paper describes our CI/CD efforts to provide easy evaluation of the support of OpenMP across different compilers using existing testsuites and benchmark suites on HPC platforms. Our main contributions include (1) the set of a Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Development (CD) workflow that captures bugs and provides faster feedback to compiler developers, (2) an evaluation of OpenMP (offloading) implementations supported by AMD, HPE, GNU, LLVM, and Intel, and (3) evaluation of the quality of compilers across different heterogeneous HPC platforms. With the comprehensive testing through the CI/CD workflow, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of OpenMP (offloading) support in different compilers and heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs and GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.
As the supercomputing landscape diversifies, solutions such as Kokkos to write vendor agnostic applications and libraries have risen in popularity. Kokkos provides a programming model designed for performance portability, which allows developers to write a single source implementation that can run efficiently on various architectures. At its heart, Kokkos maps parallel algorithms to architecture and vendor specific backends written in lower level programming models such as CUDA and HIP. Another approach to writing vendor agnostic parallel code is using OpenMP’s directives based approach, which lets developers annotate code to express parallelism. It is implemented at the compiler level and is supported by all major high performance computing vendors, as well as the primary Open Source toolchains GNU and LLVM. Since its inception, Kokkos has used OpenMP to parallelize on CPU architectures. In this paper, we explore leveraging OpenMP for a GPU backend and discuss the challenges we encountered when mapping the Kokkos APIs and semantics to OpenMP target constructs. As an exemplar workload we chose a simple conjugate gradient solver for sparse matrices. We find that performance on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs varies widely based on details of the implementation strategy and the chosen compiler. Furthermore, the performance of the OpenMP implementations decreases with increasing complexity of the investigated algorithms.
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By exploiting the coherent properties of a light source, coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) is able to obtain the sample image at a nanoscale resolution using the measured diffraction pattern. Bragg Coherent Diffraction Imaging (BCDI) has become valuable for recovering the displacement and strain field of crystals, providing a valuable tool in material science and solid-state physics. X-ray ptychography is another emerging CDI technique that can produce a high-resolution image of the extended sample and has become popular in many research areas (e.g., materials science, biology, electronics, and optics characterization). CDI including BCDI and ptychography has become an established technique in Synchrotron Facilities including the Advanced Photon Source (APS) and will greatly benefit from the 100x coherent flux increase of the upcoming APS Upgrade (APSU). The current image formation process in CDI employs iterative phase retrieval algorithms, which is a time-consuming and computationally expensive process. Especially after APSU, the traditional iterative methods will not be able to match the experimental data acquisition speed. We employ deep learning (DL) approach to replace the iterative approaches, therefore allowing hundreds of times faster recovery of the object. We developed AutoPhaseNN, a DL-based approach which learns to solve the inverse problem without labeled data. Taking 3D BCDI as a representative technique, AutoPhaseNN has been demonstrated to be one hundred times faster than traditional iterative phase retrieval methods while providing comparable image quality. The current network is trained with 64 x 64 x 64 data size, to achieve higher resolution imaging, we will need to scale the network to input and train/infer 3D arrays of size 256 x 256 x 256 (today) and of size 2560x2560x2560 (APSU). However, the scalability of the network is restricted due to the memory-intensive training process. To perform the training for a 256 x 256 x 256 data size, the required memory exceeds the capacity of the current machine. In this project, we explore using Sambanova system to train the network for the direct data inversion for CDI.
Following the mass adoption of external accelerators for high performance computing, the overall performance of many applications has become increasingly dependent on relatively small accelerated kernels. As static analysis is fundamentally limited by dynamic values and external definitions, standard ahead-of-time compilation is not always sufficient to achieve the best performance. Furthermore, many users looking to port an existing application to run on an external accelerator will not want to fundamentally restructure their programs. These and other problems can be addressed through both link-time optimization (LTO) and just-in-time (JIT) compilation, but until now had sparse and inconsistent support from the compiler. In this work, we present a new compilation method that enables device-side LTO as well as a transparent JIT compilation tool-chain for OpenMP target offloading. Our contributions include an entirely new device linking and embedding scheme to enable LTO as well as a novel JIT engine to efficiently optimize OpenMP offloading regions at run-time. We also introduce a persistent caching system to improve end-to-end runtime using the JIT engine and minimize kernel launching overheads. We measure the performance of our LTO and JIT implementation via several real-world scientific applications. With our optimizations we observe significant improvements through LTO on large applications as well as significant end-to-end execution time improvement using JIT.
As recent enhancements to the OpenMP specification become available in its implementations, there is a need to share the results of experimentation in order to better understand the OpenMP implementation’s behavior in practice, to identify pitfalls, and to learn how the implementations can be effectively deployed in scientific codes. We report on experiences gained and practices adopted when using OpenMP to port a variety of ECP applications, mini-apps and libraries based on different computational motifs to accelerator-based leadership-class high-performance supercomputer systems at the United States Department of Energy. Additionally, we identify important challenges and open problems related to the deployment of OpenMP. Through our report of experiences, we find that OpenMP implementations are successful on current supercomputing platforms and that OpenMP is a promising programming model to use for applications to be run on emerging and future platforms with accelerated nodes.
This paper presents a methodology for using LLVM-based tools to tune the DCA++ (dynamical cluster approximation) application that targets the new ARM A64FX processor. The goal is to describe the changes required for the new architecture and generate efficient single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) instructions that target the new Scalable Vector Extension instruction set. During manual tuning, the authors used the LLVM tools to improve code parallelization by using OpenMP SIMD, refactored the code and applied transformation that enabled SIMD optimizations, and ensured that the correct libraries were used to achieve optimal performance. By applying these code changes, code speed was increased by 1.98× and 78 GFlops were achieved on the A64FX processor. The authors aim to automatize parts of the efforts in the OpenMP Advisor tool, which is built on top of existing and newly introduced LLVM tooling.
This paper reports on experiences gained and practices adopted when using the latest features of OpenMP to port a variety of HPC applications and mini-apps based on different computational motifs (BerkeleyGW, WDMApp/XGC, GAMESS, GESTS, and GridMini) to accelerator-based, leadership-class, high-performance supercomputer systems at the Department of Energy. As recent enhancements to OpenMP become available in implementations, there is a need to share the results of experimentation with them in order to better understand their behavior in practice, to identify pitfalls, and to learn how they can be effectively deployed in scientific codes. Additionally, we identify best practices from these experiences that we can share with the rest of the OpenMP community.
This paper reports on experiences gained and practices adopted when using the latest features of OpenMP to port a variety of HPC applications and mini-apps based on different computational motifs (BerkeleyGW, WDMApp/XGC, GAMESS, GESTS, and GridMini) to accelerator-based, leadership-class, high-performance supercomputer systems at the Department of Energy. As recent enhancements to OpenMP become available in implementations, there is a need to share the results of experimentation with them in order to better understand their behavior in practice, to identify pitfalls, and to learn how they can be effectively deployed in scientific codes. Additionally, we identify best practices from these experiences that we can share with the rest of the OpenMP community.
We present SPRAY, an open-source header-only C++ library for sparse reductions of arrays. SPRAY is meant for applications in which a large array is collaboratively updated by multiple threads using an associative and commutative operation such as +=. Especially when each thread accesses only parts of the array, SPRAY can perform significantly better than OPENMP's built-in reduction clause or atomic updates, while also using less memory than the former. SPRAY provides both an easy-to-use interface that can serve as a drop-in replacement for OPENMP reductions and a selection of reducer objects that accumulate the final result in different thread-safe ways. We demonstrate SPRAY through multiple test cases including the LULESH shock hydrodynamics code and a transpose-matrix-vector multiplication for sparse matrices stored in CSR format. SPRAY reductions outperform built-in OPENMP reductions consistently, in some cases improving run time and memory overhead by 20X, and even beating domain-specific approaches such as Intel MKI, by over 2X in some cases. Furthermore, SPRAY reductions have a minimal impact on the code base, requiring only a few lines of source code changes. Once in place, SPRAY reduction schemes can be switched easily, allowing performance portability and tuning opportunities by separating performance-critical implementation details from application code.
The following topics are dealt with: program compilers; optimising compilers; parallel processing; software engineering; learning (artificial intelligence); multiprocessing systems; shared memory systems; optimisation; computational complexity; specification languages.
Compilers are limited by the static information directly or indirectly encoded in the program. Low-level languages, such as C/C++, are considered problematic as their weak type system and relaxed memory semantic allows for various, sometimes non-obvious, behaviors. Since compilers have to preserve the program semantics for all program executions, the existence of exceptional behavior can prevent optimizations that the developer would consider valid and might expect. Analyses to guarantee the absence of disruptive and unlikely situations are consequently an indispensable part of an optimizing compiler. However, such analyses have to be approximative and limited in scope as global and exact solutions are infeasible for any non-trivial program. In this paper, we present an automated tool to measure the effectmissing static information has on the optimizations applied to a given program. The approach generates an optimistically optimized program version which, compared to the original, defines a performance gap that can be closed by better compiler analyses and selective static program annotations. Our evaluation on six already tuned proxy applications for high-performance codes shows speedups of up to 20.6%. This clearly indicates that static uncertainty limits performance. At the same time, we observed that compilers are often unable to utilize additional static information. Thus, manual annotation of all correct static information is therefore not only error prone but also mostly redundant.