arXiv subjects

Benjamin Hazelwood

Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Hazelwood.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2020

TeaMPI -- Replication-based Resilience without the (Performance) Pain

In an era where we can not afford to checkpoint frequently, replication is a generic way forward to construct numerical simulations that can continue to run even if hardware parts fail. Yet, replication often is not employed on larger scales, as naïvely mirroring a computation once effectively halves the machine size, and as keeping replicated simulations consistent with each other is not trivial. We demonstrate for the ExaHyPE engine -- a task-based solver for hyperbolic equation systems -- that it is possible to realise resiliency without major code changes on the user side, while we introduce a novel algorithmic idea where replication reduces the time-to-solution. The redundant CPU cycles are not burned "for nothing". Our work employs a weakly consistent data model where replicas run independently yet inform each other through heartbeat messages whether they are still up and running. Our key performance idea is to let the tasks of the replicated simulations share some of their outcomes, while we shuffle the actual task execution order per replica. This way, replicated ranks can skip some local computations and automatically start to synchronise with each other. Our experiments with a production-level seismic wave-equation solver provide evidence that this novel concept has the potential to make replication affordable for large-scale simulations in high-performance computing.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

Enclave Tasking for Discontinuous Galerkin Methods on Dynamically Adaptive Meshes

High-order Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods promise to be an excellent discretisation paradigm for partial differential equation solvers by combining high arithmetic intensity with localised data access. They also facilitate dynamic adaptivity without the need for conformal meshes. A parallel evaluation of DG's weak formulation within a mesh traversal is non-trivial, as dependency graphs over dynamically adaptive meshes change, as causal constraints along resolution transitions have to be preserved, and as data sends along MPI domain boundaries have to be triggered in the correct order. We propose to process mesh elements subject to constraints with high priority or, where needed, serially throughout a traversal. The remaining cells form enclaves and are spawned into a task system. This introduces concurrency, mixes memory-intensive DG integrations with compute-bound Riemann solves, and overlaps computation and communication. We discuss implications on MPI and show that MPI parallelisation improves by a factor of three through enclave tasking, while we obtain an additional factor of two from shared memory if grids are dynamically adaptive.

cs.MS↗

arXiv2019

Studies on the energy and deep memory behaviour of a cache-oblivious, task-based hyperbolic PDE solver

We study the performance behaviour of a seismic simulation using the ExaHyPE engine with a specific focus on memory characteristics and energy needs. ExaHyPE combines dynamically adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) with ADER-DG. It is parallelized using tasks, and it is cache efficient. AMR plus ADER-DG yields a task graph which is highly dynamic in nature and comprises both arithmetically expensive tasks and tasks which challenge the memory's latency. The expensive tasks and thus the whole code benefit from AVX vectorization, though we suffer from memory access bursts. A frequency reduction of the chip improves the code's energy-to-solution. Yet, it does not mitigate burst effects. The bursts' latency penalty becomes worse once we add Intel Optane technology, increase the core count significantly, or make individual, computationally heavy tasks fall out of close caches. Thread overbooking to hide away these latency penalties contra-productive with non-inclusive caches as it destroys the cache and vectorization character. In cases where memory-intense and computationally expensive tasks overlap, ExaHyPE's cache-oblivious implementation can exploit deep, non-inclusive, heterogeneous memory effectively, as main memory misses arise infrequently and slow down only few cores. We thus propose that upcoming supercomputing simulation codes with dynamic, inhomogeneous task graphs are actively supported by thread runtimes in intermixing tasks of different compute character, and we propose that future hardware actively allows codes to downclock the cores running particular task types.

cs.MS↗

arXiv2018

Coloured and task-based stencil codes

Simple stencil codes are and remain an important building block in scientific computing. On shared memory nodes, they are traditionally parallelised through colouring or (recursive) tiling. New OpenMP versions alternatively allow users to specify data dependencies explicitly and to outsource the decision how to distribute the work to the runtime system. We evaluate traditional multithreading strategies on both Broadwell and KNL, study the arising assignment of tasks to threads and, from there, derive two efficient ways to parallelise stencil codes on regular Cartesian grids that fuse colouring and task-based approaches.

cs.MS↗