Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 10, 2012

An Application Driven Analysis of the ParalleX Execution Model (here be graph’s mention)

Filed under: Graphs,HPC,ParalleX — Patrick Durusau @ 8:03 pm

An Application Driven Analysis of the ParalleX Execution Model by Matthew Anderson, Maciej Brodowicz, Hartmut Kaiser and Thomas Sterling.

Just in case you feel the need for more information about ParalleX after that post about the LSU software release. 😉

Abstract:

Exascale systems, expected to emerge by the end of the next decade, will require the exploitation of billion-way parallelism at multiple hierarchical levels in order to achieve the desired sustained performance. The task of assessing future machine performance is approached by identifying the factors which currently challenge the scalability of parallel applications. It is suggested that the root cause of these challenges is the incoherent coupling between the current enabling technologies, such as Non-Uniform Memory Access of present multicore nodes equipped with optional hardware accelerators and the decades older execution model, i.e., the Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) model best exemplified by the message passing interface (MPI) application programming interface. A new execution model, ParalleX, is introduced as an alternative to the CSP model. In this paper, an overview of the ParalleX execution model is presented along with details about a ParalleX-compliant runtime system implementation called High Performance ParalleX (HPX). Scaling and performance results for an adaptive mesh refinement numerical relativity application developed using HPX are discussed. The performance results of this HPX-based application are compared with a counterpart MPI-based mesh refinement code. The overheads associated with HPX are explored and hardware solutions are introduced for accelerating the runtime system.

Graphaholics should also note:

Today’s conventional parallel programming methods such as MPI [1] and systems such as distributed memory massively parallelvprocessors (MPPs) and Linux clusters exhibit poor efficiency and constrained scalability for this class of applications. This severely hinders scientifi c advancement. Many other classes of applications exhibit similar properties, especially graph/tree data structures that have non uniform data access patterns. (emphasis added)

I like that, “non uniform data access patterns.”

My “gut” feeling is that this will prove very useful for processing semantics. Since semantics originate from us and have “non uniform data access patterns.”

Granted a lot of work between here and there, especially since the semantics side of the house is fond of declaring victory in favor of the latest solution.

You would think after years, decades, centuries, no, millenia of one “ultimate” solution after another, we would be a little more wary of such pronouncements. I suspect the problem is that programmers come by their proverbial laziness honestly. They get it from us. It is easier to just fall into line with whatever seems like a passable solution and to not worry about all the passable solutions that went before.

That is no doubt easier but imagine where medicine, chemistry, physics, or even computers would be if they had adopted such a model. True, we have to use models that work now, but at the same time we should encourage new, different, even challenging models that may (or may not) be better at capturing human semantics. Models that change even as we do.

LSU Releases First Open Source ParalleX Runtime Software System

Filed under: HPC,ParalleX — Patrick Durusau @ 8:01 pm

LSU Releases First Open Source ParalleX Runtime Software System

From the press release:

Louisiana State University’s Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) has delivered the first freely available open-source runtime system implementation of the ParalleX execution model. The HPX, or High Performance ParalleX, runtime software package is a modular, feature-complete, and performance oriented representation of the ParalleX execution model targeted at conventional parallel computing architectures such as SMP nodes and commodity clusters.

HPX is being provided to the open community for experimentation and application to achieve high efficiency and scalability for dynamic adaptive and irregular computational problems. HPX is a library of C++ functions that supports a set of critical mechanisms for dynamic adaptive resource management and lightweight task scheduling within the context of a global address space. It is solidly based on many years of experience in writing highly parallel applications for HPC systems.

The two-decade success of the communicating sequential processes (CSP) execution model and its message passing interface (MPI) programming model has been seriously eroded by challenges of power, processor core complexity, multi-core sockets, and heterogeneous structures of GPUs. Both efficiency and scalability for some current (strong scaled) applications and future Exascale applications demand new techniques to expose new sources of algorithm parallelism and exploit unused resources through adaptive use of runtime information.

The ParalleX execution model replaces CSP to provide a new computing paradigm embodying the governing principles for organizing and conducting highly efficient scalable computations greatly exceeding the capabilities of today’s problems. HPX is the first practical, reliable, and performance-oriented runtime system incorporating the principal concepts of ParalleX model publicly provided in open source release form.

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