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At least 19 records

Optimization and Portability of a Fusion OpenACC-based FORTRAN HPC Code from NVIDIA to AMD GPUs

NVIDIA has been the main provider of GPU hardware in HPC systems for over a decade. Most applications that benefit from GPUs have thus been developed and optimized for the NVIDIA software stack. Recent exascale HPC systems are, however, introducing GPUs from other vendors, e.g. with the AMD GPU-based OLCF Frontier system just becoming available. AMD GPUs cannot be directly accessed using the NVIDIA software stack, and require a porting effort by the application developers. This paper provides an overview of our experience porting and optimizing the CGYRO code, a widely-used fusion simulation tool based on FORTRAN with OpenACC-based GPU acceleration. While the porting from the NVIDIA compilers was relatively straightforward using the CRAY compilers on the AMD systems, the performance optimization required more fine-tuning. In the optimization effort, we uncovered code sections that had performed well on NVIDIA GPUs, but were unexpectedly slow on AMD GPUs. After AMD-targeted code optimizations, performance on AMD GPUs has increased to meet our expectations. Modest speed improvements were also seen on NVIDIA GPUs, which was an unexpected benefit of this exercise.

Sfiligoi, Igor↗

Performance Analysis of PIConGPU: Particle-in-Cell on GPUs using NVIDIA’s NSight Systems and NSight Compute

PIConGPU, Particle In Cell on GPUs, is an open source simulations framework for plasma and laser-plasma physics used to develop advanced particle accelerators for radiation therapy of cancer, high energy physics and photon science. While PIConGPU has been optimized for at least 5 years to run well on NVIDIA GPU-based clusters, there has been limited exploration by the development team of potential scalability bottlenecks using recently updated and new tools including NVIDIA’s NVProf tool and the brand-new NVIDIA NSight Suite (Systems and Compute) tools. PIConGPU is a highly optimized application that runs production jobs at scale on a system Oak Ridge Leadership Facility’s (OLCF) Summit supercomputer (using the full machine at 4600 nodes; at 98% of GPU utilization on all ~28000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs). PIConGPU has been selected as one of the the eight applications for OLCF’s coveted Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program aimed at the facility’s Frontier supercomputer (OLCF’s first exascale system to launch in 2021), to partner with our vendors (primary vendors: AMD and Cray/HPE) ensuring that Frontier will be able to perform large-scale science when it opens to users in 2022. To this effect, performance engineers on the PIConGPU team wanted to dive deep into the application to understand at the finest granularity, which portions of the code could be further optimized to exploit the hardware on Summit at it’s maximum potential and also to elucidate which key kernels should be tracked and optimized for the CAAR effort to port this code to Frontier. Any bottlenecks that are observed via performance profiling on Summit are likely to also impact scalability on the Frontier-dev system and the Frontier Early Access (EA) system. Additionally, the engineers wanted to take a closer look at the newest NVIDIA profiling tools which allows us to identify the most useful features on these tools and will provide an opportunity to compare it to new AMD and Cray’s performance analysis tool releases and provide feedback to our vendor partners on what features are most important and mission critical for CAAR efforts. The primary goal of this report is to focus on the evaluation of PIConGPU’s most time-intensive kernels using NVProf and NSight Suite. Three kernels, Current Deposition (also known as Compute Current), Particle Push (Move and Mark), and Shift Particles are known to be some of the most time-consuming kernels in PIConGPU. The Current xi Deposition kernel and Particle Push kernel both set up the particle attributes for running any physics simulation with PIConGPU, so it is crucial to improve the performance of these two kernels. In this report, we measure single GPU metrics for the three kernels, offer high level takeaways from the conducted analysis, and compare the profiling data from NSight Compute to that of NVProf. This analysis was performed using a grid size of 240 x 272 x 224, and 10 time steps with the Mid-November Figure of Merit (FOM) run setup. The Traveling Wave Electron Acceleration (TWEAC) science case used in this run is a representative science case for PIConGPU. This execution can also be used for baseline analysis on AMD MI50/ MI60 systems. As of the time of writing, the PIConGPU application has limited use for features of NSight Systems, so this report will mainly focus on insights garnered from NSight Compute. For this analysis, we run the “full” metric set available in NSight Compute version 2020.1.2 and use NSight Systems version 2020.3.1 to generate the application timeline.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

FTTN: Feature-Targeted Testing for Numerical Properties of NVIDIA & AMD Matrix Accelerators

While NVIDIA has been the dominant provider of GPUs for HPC and ML, now AMD has several offerings of GPUs. This encourages programmers to try out AMD GPUs for new codes and also port existing codes over. Unfortunately, without understanding the floating-point differences between these GPU types, software development or porting can introduce bugs—and currently such an understanding is lacking. The magnitude of this open question becomes clear if one imagines the the number of floating-point precision choices (FP16, FP32, etc.), floating-point formats (standard floats, brain-float, etc.), and execution units available (elementary units, matrix/tensor cores, etc.) Questions such as rounding modes and subnormal support are also important. Most of these answers are unknown today or are hard to access. We provide the first testing-guided approach that answers a significant number of these questions. We also devise tests to reveal internal information (e.g., extra bits kept) to make sure that our findings are reliable. Many of our tests employ systematically generated random-programs, others apply fast-math flags and some involve fused multiplyadd. Especially for tensor/matrix cores, the tests have nontrivial logic that we present Our testing approach is reusable for the plethora of GPUs yet to be introduced. Our findings include up to 7 ulps of difference between NVIDIA and AMD for sin and cos at FP32 precision and 3 ulp at FP64. In our study of matrix cores (NVIDIA) and tensor cores (AMD), we have extensively characterized rounding modes (truncation versus round-to-nearest), the number of extra internal bits kept (whether 3 bits are kept or not), subnormal support for inputs and outputs across four different floating-point formats and across NVIDIA A100 and AMD MI250X GPUs. We believe that this wealth of data becoming available for the first time may help avoid significant porting bugs when migrating code across these platforms.

Li, Xinyi↗

Case Study of Using Kokkos and SYCLs Performance-Portable Frameworks for Milc-Dslash Benchmark on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs

Six of the top ten supercomputers in the TOP500 list from June 2021 rely on NVIDIA GPUs to achieve their peak compute bandwidth. With the announcement of Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan, Intel and AMD have also entered the domain of providing GPUs for scientific computing. A consequence of the increased diversity in the GPU landscape is the emergence of portable programming models such as Kokkos, SYCL, OpenCL, and OpenMP, which allow application developers to maintain a single-source code across a diverse range of hardware architectures. While the portable frameworks try to optimize the compute resource usage on a given architecture, it is the programmers responsibility to expose parallelism in an application that can take advantage of thousands of processing elements available on GPUs. In this paper, we introduce a GPU-friendly parallel implementation of Milc-Dslash that exposes multiple hierarchies of parallelism in the algorithm. Milc-Dslash was designed to serve as a benchmark with highly optimized matrix-vector multiplications to measure the resource utilization on the GPU systems. The parallel hierarchies in the Milc-Dslash algorithm are mapped onto a target hardware using Kokkos and SYCL programming models. We present the performance achieved by Kokkos and SYCL implementations of Milc-Dslash on NVIDIA A100 GPU, AMD MI100 GPU, and Intel Gen9 GPU. Additionally, we compare the Kokkos and SYCL performances with those obtained from the versions written in CUDA and HIP programming models on NVIDIA A100 GPU and AMD MI100 GPU, respectively.

Dufek, Amanda S↗

Studying CPU and memory utilization of applications on Fujitsu A64FX and Nvidia Grace Superchip

ARM-based manycore CPU architectures are well-positioned to provide the rising memory throughput requirements of modern data intensive scientific applications in High Performance Computing (HPC). The Fujitsu A64FX CPU platform is based on the ARM v8.2A architecture, and is the processor of the flagship Japanese supercomputer - "Fugaku", which was previously ranked as the #1 supercomputer in the world according to the Top500 list. The Nvidia Grace superchip features 144 Neoverse V2 cores based on the ARMv9 architecture with 4x128b SVE2, providing exceptional computational power. The chip supports up to 480GB of memory, making it ideal for AI, machine learning, and scientific computing workloads. In this paper, we conduct a thorough performance exploration of a variety of parallel bandwidth-sensitive benchmarks and applications compiled with the native Fujitsu compiler on a Fugaku A64FX compute node and ARM (LLVM) Compiler on an NVIDIA Grace superchip compute node, engaging all the computational cores per cluster using OpenMP multithreading (assuming the cores can drive the available bandwidth). Our ultimate goals are to study the resource utilization of scientific applications and benchmarks on A64FX and Grace superchip, considering graph application scenarios ( GAP Benchmark suite) and eleven appli- cation proxies from the Rodinia heterogeneous benchmark suite (considering domains such as Data Mining, Bioinformatics, Fluid Dynamics, Pattern Recognition, etc.). Through exhaustive performance monitoring, we quantify the resource utilization of diverse OpenMP-based HPC applications on both the Fujitsu A64FX and the Nvidia Grace Superchip platforms.

benchmarking, Performance Analysis, High performan↗

LDMS-GPU: Lightweight Distributed Metric Service (LDMS) for NVIDIA GPGPUs

GPUs are now a fundamental accelerator for many high-performance computing applications. They are viewed by many as a technology facilitator for the surge in fields like machine learning and Convolutional Neural Networks. To deliver the best performance on a GPU, we need to create monitoring tools to ensure that we optimize the code to get the most performance and efficiency out of a GPU. Since NVIDIA GPUs are currently the most commonly implemented in HPC applications and systems, NVIDIA tools are the solution for performance monitoring. The Light-Weight Distributed Metric System (LDMS) at Sandia is an infrastructure widely adopted for large-scale systems and application monitoring. Sandia has developed CPU application monitoring capability within LDMS. Therefore, we chose to develop a GPU monitoring capability within the same framework. In this report, we discuss the current limitations in the NVIDIA monitoring tools, how we overcame such limitations, and present an overview of the tool we built to monitor GPU performance in LDMS and its capabilities. Also, we discuss our current validation results. Most of the performance counter results are the same in both vendor tools and our tool when using LDMS to collect these results. Furthermore, our tool provides these statistics during the entire runtime of the tool as a time series and not just aggregate statistics at the end of the application run. This allows the user to see the progress of the behavior of the applications during their lifetime.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Optimizing High-Throughput Inference on Graph Neural Networks at Shared Computing Facilities with the NVIDIA Triton Inference Server

Abstract With machine learning applications now spanning a variety of computational tasks, multi-user shared computing facilities are devoting a rapidly increasing proportion of their resources to such algorithms. Graph neural networks (GNNs), for example, have provided astounding improvements in extracting complex signatures from data and are now widely used in a variety of applications, such as particle jet classification in high energy physics (HEP). However, GNNs also come with an enormous computational penalty that requires the use of GPUs to maintain reasonable throughput. At shared computing facilities, such as those used by physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), methodical resource allocation and high throughput at the many-user scale are key to ensuring that resources are being used as efficiently as possible. These facilities, however, primarily provide CPU-only nodes, which proves detrimental to time-to-insight and computational throughput for workflows that include machine learning inference. In this work, we describe how a shared computing facility can use the NVIDIA Triton Inference Server to optimize its resource allocation and computing structure, recovering high throughput while scaling out to multiple users by massively parallelizing their machine learning inference. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this system in a realistic multi-user environment, we use the Fermilab Elastic Analysis Facility augmented with the Triton Inference Server to provide scalable and high-throughput access to a HEP-specific GNN and report on the outcome.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Understanding Performance Portability of Bioinformatics Applications in SYCL on an NVIDIA GPU

Our goal is to have a better understanding of performance portability of SYCL kernels on a GPU. Toward this goal, we migrate representative kernels in bioinformatics applications from CUDA to SYCL, evaluate their performance on an NVIDIA GPU, and explain the performance gaps through performance profiling and analyses. We hope that the findings provide valuable feedback to the development of the SYCL ecosystem.

Jin, Zheming↗

OpenACC offloading of the MFC compressible multiphase flow solver on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs

GPUs are the heart of the latest generations of supercomputers. We efficiently accelerate a compressible multiphase flow solver via OpenACC on NVIDIA and AMD Instinct GPUs. Optimization is accomplished by specifying the directive clauses gang vector and collapse. Further speedups of six and ten times are achieved by packing user-defined types into coalesced multidimensional arrays and manual inlining via metaprogramming. Additional optimizations yield seven-times speedup of array packing and thirty-times speedup of select kernels on Frontier. Weak scaling efficiencies of 97% and 95% are observed when scaling to 50% of Summit and 87% of Frontier. Strong scaling efficiencies of 84% and 81% are observed when increasing the device count by a factor of 8 and 16 on V100 and MI250X hardware. The strong scaling efficiency of AMD’s MI250X increases to 92% when increasing the device count by a factor of 16 when GPU-aware MPI is used for communication.

Wilfong, Benjamin↗

Performance portability study of epistasis detection using SYCL on NVIDIA GPU

We describe the experience of converting a CUDA implementation of a high-order epistasis detection algorithm to SYCL. The goals are for our work to be useful to application and compiler developers with a detailed description of migration paths between CUDA and SYCL. Evaluating the CUDA and SYCL applications on an NVIDIA V100 GPU, we find that the optimization of loop unrolling needs to be applied manually to the SYCL kernel for obtaining comparable performance. The performance of the SYCL group reduce function, an alternative to the CUDA warp-based reduction, depends on the problem and work group sizes. The 64-bit popcount operation implemented with tree of adders is slightly faster than the built-in popcount operation. When the number of OpenMP threads is four, the highest performance of the SYCL and CUDA applications are comparable.

Jin, Zheming↗

Moment Representation of Regularized Lattice Boltzmann Methods on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs

The lattice Boltzmann method is a highly scalable Navier-Stokes solver that has been applied to flow problems in a wide array of domains. However, the method is bandwidth-bound on modern GPU accelerators and has a large memory footprint. In this paper, we present new 2D and 3D GPU implementations of two different regularized lattice Boltzmann methods, which are not only able to achieve an acceleration of ∼ 1.4 × w.r.t. reference lattice Boltzmann implementations but also reduce the memory requirements by up to 35% and 47% in 2D and 3D simulations respectively. These new approaches are evaluated on NVIDIA and AMD GPU architectures.

Valero Lara, Pedro↗

nvidia dataframe library patch to support parquet indexing

On behalf of our WFO sponsors/collaborators, we are working closely with NVIDIA to improve their public, open-source GPU dataframes library. We are improving the library's support for reading and writing Parquet (an open source file format) for general-purpose cloud storage and processing. This patch better supports the indexing found in the more recent Parquet specifications. Is there

Seidl, EdwardT↗

FTTN: Feature-Targeted Testing for Numerical Properties of NVIDIA & AMD Matrix Accelerators

FTTN is a test suite to evaluate the numerical behaviors of matrix accelerators of GPUs (NVIDIA Tensor Cores and AMD Matrix Cores) in a quick and simple setting. Matrix accelerators are heavily used in today's computationally intense applications to speed up matrix multiplications. This test suite provides a comprehensive study on the numerical behaviors of these accelerators, including support for subnormals, rounding modes, extra precision bits and FMA features. Is there

Laguna Peralta, Ignacio↗

Sum Reduction with OpenMP Offload on NVIDIA Grace-Hopper System

We evaluate the performance of the baseline and optimized reductions in OpenMP on an NVIDIA Grace-Hopper system. We explore the impacts of the number of teams, the number of elements to sum per loop iteration, and simultaneous execution on the central-processing unit (CPU) and the GPU in the unified memory (UM) mode upon the reduction performance. The experimental results show that the optimized reductions are 6.120X to 20.906X faster than the baselines on the GPU, and their efficiency ranges from 89% to 95% of the theoretical GPU memory bandwidth. Depending on where an input array is allocated in the program when co-running the reduction on the CPU and GPU in the UM mode, the average speedup over the GPU-only execution is approximately 2.484 or 1.067, and the speedup of the optimized reductions over the baseline reductions ranges from 0.996 to 10.654 or from 0.998 to 6.729.

Jin, Zheming↗

Kernel fusion in atomistic spin dynamics simulations on Nvidia GPUs using tensor core

In atomistic spin dynamics simulations, the time cost of constructing the space- and time-displaced pair correlation function in real space increases quadratically as the number of spins N, leading to significant computational effort. The GEMM subroutine can be adopted to accelerate the calculation of the dynamical spin-spin correlation function, but the computational cost of simulating large spin systems (>40000 spins) on CPUs remains expensive. In this work, we perform the simulation on the graphics processing unit (GPU), a hardware solution widely used as an accelerator for scientific computing and deep learning. Here we show that GPUs can accelerate the simulation up to 25-fold compared to multi-core CPUs when using the GEMM subroutine on both. To hide memory latency, we fuse the element-wise operation into the GEMM kernel using CUTLASS that can improve the performance by 26% ~ 33% compared to implementation based on cuBLAS. Furthermore, we perform the on-the-fly calculation in the epilogue of the GEMM subroutine to avoid saving intermediate results on global memory, which makes the large-scale atomistic spin dynamics simulation feasible and affordable.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗