Parchman, Zachary | Engineering Papers

DOE OSTI2018

SharP Unified Memory Allocator: An Intent-Based Memory Allocator for Extreme-Scale Systems

The pre-exascale systems will soon be deployed with a deep, complex memory hierarchy composed of many heterogeneous memories. This presents multiple challenges for users including: how to allocate data objects with locality between memories and devices for the various memories in these systems, which includes DRAM, High-bandwidth Memory (HBM), and non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM), and how to perform these allocations while providing portability for their application. Currently, the user can make use of multiple, disjoint libraries to allocate data objects on these memories. However, it is difficult to obtain locality between memories and devices when using libraries that are unaware of each other. This paper presents the Unified Memory Allocator (UMA) of the SHARed data-structure centric Programming abstraction (SharP) library, which provides a unified interface for memory allocations across DRAM, HBM, and NVRAM and is extensible to support future memory types. In addition, the SharP UMA allows for portability between systems by supporting both explicit and implicit, intent-based memory allocations. To demonstrate the ease of use of the SharP UMA, we have extended both Open MPIand OpenSHMEM-Xto support SharP. We validate this work by evaluating the performance implications and intent-based approach with synthetic benchmarks as well as adaptations of the Graph500 benchmark.

Aderholdt, William↗

DOE OSTI2018

SharP Data Constructs: Data Constructs to Enable Data-Centric Computing

Extreme-scale applications (i.e., Big-Compute) are becoming increasingly data-intensive, i.e., producing and consuming increasingly large amounts of data. The HPC systems traditionally used for these applications are now used for Big-Data applications such as data analytics, social network analysis, machine learning, and genomics. As a consequence of these trends, the system architecture should be flexible and data-centric. This can already be witnessed in the pre-exascale systems with TBs of on-node hierarchical and heterogeneous memories, PBs of system memory, low-latency, high-throughput networks, and many threaded cores. As such, the pre-exascale systems suit the needs of both Big-Compute and Big-Data applications. Though the system architecture is flexible enough to support both Big-Compute and Big-Data, we argue there is a software gap. Particularly, we need data-centric abstractions to leverage the full potential of the system, i.e., there is a need for native support for data resilience, the ability to express data locality and affinity, mechanisms to reduce data movement, the ability to share data, and abstractions to express User's data usage and data access patterns. In this paper, we (i) show the need for taking a holistic approach towards data-centric abstractions, (ii) show how these approaches were realized in the SHARed data-structure centric Programming abstraction (SharP) library, a data-structure centric programming abstraction, and (iii) apply these approaches to a variety of applications that demonstrate its usefulness. Particularly, we apply these approaches to QMCPack and the Graph500 benchmark and demonstrate the advantages of this approach on extreme-scale systems.

Aderholdt, William Ferrol↗