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Communication efficient work distributions in stencil operation based applications
Author(s) -
Schneible Joseph,
Riha Lubomir,
Malik Maria,
ElGhazawi Tarek,
Alexandru Andrei
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.3210
Subject(s) - infiniband , stencil , computer science , parallel computing , graphics , memory footprint , computation , supercomputer , computational science , interconnection , multiprocessing , algorithm , telecommunications , operating system
Summary In recent years, the use of accelerators in conjunction with CPUs, known as heterogeneous computing, has brought about significant performance increases for scientific applications. One of the best examples of this is lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a stencil operation based simulation. These simulations have a large memory footprint necessitating the use of many graphics processing units (GPUs) in parallel. This requires the use of a heterogeneous cluster with one or more GPUs per node. In order to obtain optimal performance, it is necessary to determine an efficient communication pattern between GPUs on the same node and between nodes. In this paper, we present a performance model based method for minimizing the communication time of applications with stencil operations, such as lattice QCD, on heterogeneous computing systems with a non‐blocking InfiniBand interconnection network. The proposed method is able to increase the performance of the most computationally intensive kernel of lattice QCD by 25% due to improved overlapping of communication and computation. We also demonstrate that the aforementioned performance model and efficient communication patterns can be used to determine a cost efficient heterogeneous system design for stencil operation based applications. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.