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ARENA: Asynchronous Reconfigurable Accelerator Ring to Enable Data-Centric Parallel Computing

The next generation HPC and data centers are likely to be reconfigurable and data-centric due to the trend of hardware specialization and the emergence of data-driven applications. In this work, we propose ARENA – an asynchronous reconfigurable accelerator ring architecture as a potential scenario on how the future HPC and data centers will be like. Despite using the coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) as the substrate platform, our key contribution is not only the CGRA-cluster design itself, but also the ensemble of a new architecture and programming model that enables asynchronous tasking across a cluster of reconfigurable nodes, so as to bring specialized computation to the data rather than the reverse. We presume distributed data storage without asserting any prior knowledge on the data distribution. Hardware specialization occurs at runtime when a task finds the majority of data it requires are available at the present node. In other words, we dynamically generate specialized CGRA accelerators where the data reside. The asynchronous tasking for bringing computation to data is achieved by circulating the task token, which describes the dataflow graphs to be executed for a task, among the CGRA cluster connected by a fast ring network. Evaluations on a set of HPC and data-driven applications across different domains show that ARENA can provide better parallel scalability with reduced data movement (53.9 percent). Compared with contemporary compute-centric parallel models, ARENA can bring on average 4.37× speedup. The synthesized CGRAs and their task-dispatchers only occupy 2.93mm 2 chip area under 45nm process technology and can run at 800MHz with on average 759.8mW power consumption. ARENA also supports the concurrent execution of multi-applications, offering ideal architectural support for future high-performance parallel computing and data analytics systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Performance trade-offs in reconfigurable networks for HPC

Designing efficient interconnects to support high-bandwidth and low-latency communication is critical toward realizing high performance computing (HPC) and data center (DC) systems in the exascale era. At extreme computing scales, providing the requisite bandwidth through overprovisioning becomes impractical. These challenges have motivated studies exploring reconfigurable network architectures that can adapt to traffic patterns at runtime using optical circuit switching. Despite the plethora of proposed architectures, surprisingly little is known about the relative performances and trade-offs among different reconfigurable network designs. We aim to bridge this gap by tackling two key issues in reconfigurable network design. First, we study how cost, power consumption, network performance, and scalability vary based on optical circuit switch (OCS) placement in the physical topology. Specifically, we consider two classes of reconfigurable architectures: one that places OCSs between top-of-rack (ToR) switches—ToR-reconfigurable networks (TRNs)—and one that places OCSs between pods of racks—pod-reconfigurable networks (PRNs). Second, we tackle the effects of reconfiguration frequency on network performance. Our results, based on network simulations driven by real HPC and DC workloads, show that while TRNs are optimized for low fan-out communication patterns, they are less suited for carrying high fan-out workloads. PRNs exhibit better overall trade-off, capable of performing comparably to a fully non-blocking fat tree for low fan-out workloads, and significantly outperform TRNs for high fan-out communication patterns.

Teh, Min Yee↗

On the Marriage of Asynchronous Many Task Runtimes and Big Data: A Glance

The rise of the accelerator-based architectures and reconfigurable computing have showcased the weakness of software stack toolchains that still maintain a static view of the hardware instead of relying on a symbiotic relationship between static (e.g., compilers) and dynamic tools (e.g., runtimes). In the past decades, this need has given rise to adaptive runtimes with increasingly finer computational tasks. These finer tasks help to take advantage of the hardware by switching out when a long latency operation is encountered (because of the deeper memory hierarchies and new memory technologies that might target streaming instead of random access), thus trading off idle time for unrelated work. Examples of these finer task runtimes are Asynchronous Many Task (AMT) runtimes, in which highly efficient computational graphs run on a variety of hardware. Due to its inherent latency tolerant characteristics, Latency-sensitive applications, such as Graph Analytics and Big Data can effectively use these runtimes. This paper aims to present an example of how the careful design of an AMT can exploit the hardware substrate when faced with high latency applications such as the ones given in the Big Data domain. Moreover, with its introspection and adaptive capabilities, we aim to show the power of these runtimes when facing the changing requirements of the application workloads. We use the Performance Open Community Runtime (P-OCR) as our vehicle to demonstrate the concepts presented here.

adaptive runtime, big data analysis↗

A flexible data acquisition system architecture for the Nab experiment

Here, the Nab experiment will measure the electron–neutrino correlation and Fierz interference term in free neutron beta decay to test the Standard Model and probe Beyond the Standard Model physics. Using National Instrument’s PXIe-5171 Reconfigurable Oscilloscope module, we have developed a data acquisition system that is not only capable of meeting Nab’s specifications, but flexible enough to be adapted in situ as the experimental environment dictates. The L1 and L2 trigger logic can be reconfigured to optimize the system for coincidence event detection at runtime through configuration files and LabVIEW controls. This system is capable of identifying L1 triggers at a rate of at least 1 MHz, while reading out a peak signal rate of approximately 2 GB/s. During the commissioning phase of the experiment, the system ran at a sustained readout rate of 400 MB/s of detector signal data originating from roughly 6 kHz L2 triggers, well within the peak performance of the system.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

CQNN: a CGRA-based QNN Framework

We propose a novel Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture-based (CGRA) QNN acceleration framework, CQNN. CQNN has a large number of basic components for binary functions. By programming CQNN at runtime according to the target QNN models, these basic components are integrated efficiently to support QNN functions with any data-width and hyper-parameter requirements and CQNN is reconfigured to have the optimal architecture for the target models. The framework includes compiler, architecture design, simulator and RTL generator. Experimental results show CQNNs can complete the inference of AlexNet and VGG-16 within 0.13ms and 2.63ms.

Geng, Tong↗

Towards Low-Overhead Resilience for Data Parallel Deep Learning

Data parallel techniques have been widely adopted both in academia and industry as a tool to enable scalable training of deep learning models. At scale, DL training jobs can fail due to software or hardware bugs, may need to be preempted or terminated due to unexpected events, or may perform suboptimally because they were misconfigured. Under such circumstances, there is a need to recover and/or reconfigure data-parallel DL training jobs on-the-fly, while minimizing the impact on the accuracy of the DNN model and the runtime overhead. In this regard, state-of-art techniques adopted by the HPC community mostly rely on checkpoint-restart, which inevitably leads to loss of progress, thus increasing the runtime overhead. In this paper we explore alternative techniques that exploit the properties of modern deep learning frameworks (overlapping of gradient averaging and weight updates with local gradient computations through pipeline parallelism) to reduce the overhead of resilience/elasticity. To this end we introduce a failure simulation framework and two resilience strategies (immediate mini-batch rollback and lossy forward recovery), which we study compared with checkpoint-restart approaches in a variety of settings in order to understand the trade-offs between the accuracy loss of the DNN model and the runtime overhead.

data-parallel training↗

Lifting and Dropping VMs to Dynamically Transition Between Time- and Space-sharing for Large-Scale HPC Systems

As HPC environments increasingly integrate with edge based systems, system architectures will need to handle a broader class of workloads and scheduling requirements. One result of this shift will be the need to simultaneously support bulk-synchronous parallel (BSP) and on-demand service based applications on the same infrastructure. This in turn will require that future resource management approaches utilize both space-shared as well as time-shared resource scheduling strategies. In this work we introduce the concept of "VM-lifting'' (and its inverse "VM-Dropping'') which allows dynamically switching an HPC workload between space-shared and time-shared scheduling regimes. Our work targets co-kernel based HPC system software environments, in which multiple specialized OS kernels execute natively on dedicated physical resource partitions inside a single compute node. With VM-lifting, a native co-kernel can be migrated at runtime to and from locally hosted Virtual Machine Environments due to changing scheduling requirements of the node. This allows an HPC node to be dynamically (re-)configured as either a time-shared Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) resource or a dedicated space shared resource based on the current workload demands. We have implemented this approach in the context of the Hobbes Exascale System Software stack and have demonstrated that a node can be reconfigured with minimal impact on the running applications.

Gordon, Nick↗

Using containers to speed up development, to run integration tests and to teach about distributed systems

GlideinWMS is a workload manager provisioning resources for many experiments including CMS and DUNE. The software is distributed both as native packages and specialized production containers. Following an approach used in other communities like web development we built our workspaces, system-like containers to ease development and testing. Developers can change the source tree or check out a different branch and quickly reconfigure the services to see the effect of their changes. In this paper, we’ll talk about what differentiates workspaces from other containers. We’ll describe our base system composed of three containers. A one-node cluster including a compute element and a batch system. A GlideinWMS Factory controlling pilot jobs. And a scheduler and Frontend, to submit jobs and provision resources. Additional containers can be used for optional components. This system can easily run on a laptop and we’ll share our evaluation of different container runtimes, with an eye for ease of use and performance. Finally, we’ll talk about our experience as developers and with students. The GlideinWMS workspaces are easily integrated with IDEs like VS Code, simplifying debugging and allowing development and testing of the system also when offline. They simplified the training and onboarding of new team members and Summer interns. And they were useful in workshops where students could have first-hand experience with the mechanisms and components that, in production, run millions of jobs.

Mambelli, Marco↗

Using Containers to Speed Up Development, to Run Integration Tests and to Teach About Distributed Systems

GlideinWMS is a workload manager provisioning resources for many experiments, including CMS and DUNE. The software is distributed both as native packages and specialized production containers. Following an approach used in other communities like web development, we built our workspaces, system-like containers to ease development and testing. Developers can change the source tree or check out a different branch and quickly reconfigure the services to see the effect of their changes. In this paper, we will talk about what differentiates workspaces from other containers. We will describe our base system, composed of three containers: a one-node cluster including a compute element and a batch system, a GlideinWMS Factory controlling pilot jobs, and a scheduler and Frontend to submit jobs and provision resources. Additional containers can be used for optional components. This system can easily run on a laptop, and we will share our evaluation of different container runtimes, with an eye for ease of use and performance. Finally, we will talk about our experience as developers and with students. The GlideinWMS workspaces are easily integrated with IDEs like VS Code, simplifying debugging and allowing development and testing of the system even when offline. They simplified the training and onboarding of new team members and summer interns. And they were useful in workshops where students could have first-hand experience with the mechanisms and components that, in production, run millions of jobs.

Mambelli, Marco [Fermilab] (ORCID:0000000294892681↗