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Section: Research Program

Ultra-scale Optimization

The third line of our research program that accentuates our difference from other (project-)teams of the related Inria scientific theme is the ultra-scale optimization. This research line is complementary to the two others, which are sources of massive parallelism and with which it should be combined to solve BOPs. Indeed, ultra-scale computing is necessary for the effective resolution of the large amount of subproblems generated by decomposition of BOPs, parallel evaluation of simulation-based fitness and metamodels, etc. These sources of parallelism are attractive for solving BOPs and are natural candidates for ultra-scale supercomputers (In the context of Bonus , supercomputers are composed of several massively parallel processing nodes (inter-node parallelism) including multi-core processors and GPUs (intra-node parallelism).). However, their efficient use raises a big challenge consisting in managing efficiently a massive amount of irregular tasks on supercomputers with multiple levels of parallelism and heterogeneous computing resources (GPU, multi-core CPU with various architectures) and networks. Raising such challenge requires to tackle three major issues, scalability, heterogeneity and fault-tolerance, discussed in the following.

The scalability issue requires, on the one hand, the definition of scalable data structures for efficient storage and management of the tremendous amount of subproblems generated by decomposition  [45]. On the other hand, achieving extreme scalability requires also the optimization of communications (in number of messages, their size and scope) especially at the inter-node level. For that, we target the design of asynchronous locality-aware algorithms as we did in  [41], [48]. In addition, efficient mechanisms are needed for granularity management and coding of the work units stored and communicated during the resolution process.

Heterogeneity means harnessing various resources including multi-core processors within different architectures and GPU devices. The challenge is therefore to design and implement hybrid optimization algorithms taking into account the difference in computational power between the various resources as well as the resource-specific issues. On the one hand, to deal with the heterogeneity in terms of computational power, we adopt in Bonus the dynamic load balancing approach based on the Work Stealing (WS) asynchronous paradigm (A WS mechanism is mainly defined by two components: a victim selection strategy which selects the processing core to be stolen and a work sharing policy which determines the part and amount of the work unit to be given to the thief upon WS request.) at the inter-node as well as at the intra-node level. We have already investigated such approach, with various victim selection and work sharing strategies in  [48][7]. On the other hand, hardware resource specific-level optimization mechanisms are required to deal with related issues such as thread divergence and memory optimization on GPU, data sharing and synchronization, cache locality, and vectorization on multi-core processors, etc. These issues have been considered separately in the literature including our works [9], [1]. Indeed, in most of existing works related to GPU-accelerated optimization only a single CPU core is used. This leads to a huge resource wasting especially with the increase of the number of processing cores integrated into modern processors. Using jointly the two components raises additional issues including data and work partitioning, the optimization of CPU-GPU data transfers, etc.

Another issue the scalability induces is the increasing probability of failures in modern supercomputers  [46]. Indeed, with the increase of their size to millions of processing cores their MTBF tends to be shorter and shorter  [44]. Failures may have different sources including hardware and software faults, silent errors, etc. In our context, we consider failures leading to the loss of work unit(s) being processed by some thread(s) during the resolution process. The major issue, which is particularly critical in exact optimization, is how to recover the failed work units to ensure a reliable execution. Such issue is tackled in the literature using different approaches: algorithm-based fault tolerance, checkpoint/restart (CR), message logging and redundancy. The CR approach can be system-level, library/user-level or application-level. Thanks to its efficiency in terms of memory footprint, adopted in Bonus  [2], the application-level approach is commonly and widely used in the literature. This approach raises several issues mainly: what is critical information which defines the state of the work units and allows to resume properly their execution? when, where and how (using which data structures) to store it efficiently? how to deal with the two other issues: scalability and heterogeneity?

The last but not least major issue which is another roadblock to exascale is the programming of massive-scale applications for modern supercomputers. On the path to exascale, we will investigate the programming environments and execution supports able to deal with exascale challenges: large numbers of threads, heterogeneous resources, etc. Various exascale programming approaches are being investigated by the parallel computing community and HPC builders: extending existing programming languages (e.g. DSL-C++) and environments/libraries (MPI+X, etc.), proposing new solutions including mainly PGAS-based environments (Chapel, UPC, X10, etc.). It is worth noting here that our objective is not to develop a programming environment nor a runtime support for exascale computing. Instead, we aim to collaborate with the research teams (inside or outside Inria) having such objective.

To sum up, we put the focus on the design and implementation of efficient big optimization algorithms dealing jointly (uncommon in parallel optimization) with the major issues of ultra-scale computing mainly the scalability up to millions of cores using scalable data structures and asynchronous locality-aware work stealing, heterogeneity addressing the multi-core and GPU-specific issues and those related to their combination, and scalable GPU-aware fault tolerance. A strong effort will be devoted to this latter challenge, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, using application-level checkpoint/restart approach to deal with failures.