Section: Research Program

High-performance computing on next generation architectures

Participants : Emmanuel Agullo, Olivier Coulaud, Mathieu Faverge, Luc Giraud, Abdou Guermouche, Matias Hastaran, Guillaume Latu, Grégoire Pichon, Florent Pruvost, Pierre Ramet, Jean Roman, Emrullah Fatih Yetkin.

The research directions proposed in HiePACS are strongly influenced by both the applications we are studying and the architectures that we target (i.e., massively parallel heterogeneous many-core architectures, ...). Our main goal is to study the methodology needed to efficiently exploit the new generation of high-performance computers with all the constraints that it induces. To achieve this high-performance with complex applications we have to study both algorithmic problems and the impact of the architectures on the algorithm design.

From the application point of view, the project will be interested in multiresolution, multiscale and hierarchical approaches which lead to multi-level parallelism schemes. This hierarchical parallelism approach is necessary to achieve good performance and high-scalability on modern massively parallel platforms. In this context, more specific algorithmic problems are very important to obtain high performance. Indeed, the kind of applications we are interested in are often based on data redistribution for example (e.g., code coupling applications). This well-known issue becomes very challenging with the increase of both the number of computational nodes and the amount of data. Thus, we have both to study new algorithms and to adapt the existing ones. In addition, some issues like task scheduling have to be restudied in this new context. It is important to note that the work developed in this area will be applied for example in the context of code coupling (see Section 3.5).

Considering the complexity of modern architectures like massively parallel architectures or new generation heterogeneous multicore architectures, task scheduling becomes a challenging problem which is central to obtain a high efficiency. Of course, this work requires the use/design of scheduling algorithms and models specifically to tackle our target problems. This has to be done in collaboration with our colleagues from the scheduling community like for example O. Beaumont (Inria REALOPT Project-Team). It is important to note that this topic is strongly linked to the underlying programming model. Indeed, considering multicore architectures, it has appeared, in the last five years, that the best programming model is an approach mixing multi-threading within computational nodes and message passing between them. In the last five years, a lot of work has been developed in the high-performance computing community to understand what is critic to efficiently exploit massively multicore platforms that will appear in the near future. It appeared that the key for the performance is firstly the granularity of the computations. Indeed, in such platforms the granularity of the parallelism must be small so that we can feed all the computing units with a sufficient amount of work. It is thus very crucial for us to design new high performance tools for scientific computing in this new context. This will be developed in the context of our solvers, for example, to adapt to this new parallel scheme. Secondly, the larger the number of cores inside a node, the more complex the memory hierarchy. This remark impacts the behaviour of the algorithms within the node. Indeed, on this kind of platforms, NUMA effects will be more and more problematic. Thus, it is very important to study and design data-aware algorithms which take into account the affinity between computational threads and the data they access. This is particularly important in the context of our high-performance tools. Note that this work has to be based on an intelligent cooperative underlying run-time (like the tools developed by the Inria STORM Project-Team) which allows a fine management of data distribution within a node.

Another very important issue concerns high-performance computing using “heterogeneous” resources within a computational node. Indeed, with the deployment of the GPU and the use of more specific co-processors, it is important for our algorithms to efficiently exploit these new type of architectures. To adapt our algorithms and tools to these accelerators, we need to identify what can be done on the GPU for example and what cannot. Note that recent results in the field have shown the interest of using both regular cores and GPU to perform computations. Note also that in opposition to the case of the parallelism granularity needed by regular multicore architectures, GPU requires coarser grain parallelism. Thus, making both GPU and regular cores work all together will lead to two types of tasks in terms of granularity. This represents a challenging problem especially in terms of scheduling. From this perspective, we investigate new approaches for composing parallel applications within a runtime system for heterogeneous platforms.

In that framework, the SOLHAR project aims at studying and designing algorithms and parallel programming models for implementing direct methods for the solution of sparse linear systems on emerging computers equipped with accelerators. Several attempts have been made to accomplish the porting of these methods on such architectures; the proposed approaches are mostly based on a simple offloading of some computational tasks (the coarsest grained ones) to the accelerators and rely on fine hand-tuning of the code and accurate performance modeling to achieve efficiency. SOLHAR proposes an innovative approach which relies on the efficiency and portability of runtime systems, such as the StarPU tool developed in the STORM team. Although the SOLHAR project will focus on heterogeneous computers equipped with GPUs due to their wide availability and affordable cost, the research accomplished on algorithms, methods and programming models will be readily applicable to other accelerator devices. Our final goal would be to have high performance solvers and tools which can efficiently run on all these types of complex architectures by exploiting all the resources of the platform (even if they are heterogeneous).

In order to achieve an advanced knowledge concerning the design of efficient computational kernels to be used on our high performance algorithms and codes, we will develop research activities first on regular frameworks before extending them to more irregular and complex situations. In particular, we will work first on optimized dense linear algebra kernels and we will use them in our more complicated direct and hybrid solvers for sparse linear algebra and in our fast multipole algorithms for interaction computations. In this context, we will participate to the development of those kernels in collaboration with groups specialized in dense linear algebra. In particular, we intend develop a strong collaboration with the group of Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee and collaborating research groups. The objectives will be to develop dense linear algebra algorithms and libraries for multicore architectures in the context the PLASMA project and for GPU and hybrid multicore/GPU architectures in the context of the MAGMA project. The framework that hosts all these research activities is the associate team MORSE . A new solver has emerged from the associate team, Chameleon. While PLASMA and MAGMA focus on multicore and GPU architectures, respectively, Chameleon makes the most out of heterogeneous architectures thanks to task-based dynamic runtime systems.

A more prospective objective is to study the resiliency in the context of large-scale scientific applications for massively parallel architectures. Indeed, with the increase of the number of computational cores per node, the probability of a hardware crash on a core or of a memory corruption is dramatically increased. This represents a crucial problem that needs to be addressed. However, we will only study it at the algorithmic/application level even if it needed lower-level mechanisms (at OS level or even hardware level). Of course, this work can be performed at lower levels (at operating system) level for example but we do believe that handling faults at the application level provides more knowledge about what has to be done (at application level we know what is critical and what is not). The approach that we will follow will be based on the use of a combination of fault-tolerant implementations of the run-time environments we use (like for example ULFM) and an adaptation of our algorithms to try to manage this kind of faults. This topic represents a very long range objective which needs to be addressed to guaranty the robustness of our solvers and applications. In that respect, we are involved in the EXA2CT FP7 project.

Finally, it is important to note that the main goal of HiePACS is to design tools and algorithms that will be used within complex simulation frameworks on next-generation parallel machines. Thus, we intend with our partners to use the proposed approach in complex scientific codes and to validate them within very large scale simulations as well as designing parallel solution in co-design collaborations.