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Taming Parallel I/O Complexity with Auto-Tuning
We present an auto-tuning system for optimizing I/O performance of HDF5 applications and demonstrate its value across platforms, applications, and at scale. The system uses genetic algorithms to search a large space of tunable parameters and to identify effective settings at all layers of the parallel I/O stack. The parameter settings are applied transparently by the auto-tuning system via dynamically intercepted HDF5 calls. To validate our auto-tuning system, we applied it to three I/O benchmarks (VPIC, VORPAL, and GCRM) that replicate the I/O activity of their respective applications. We tested the system with different weak-scaling configurations (128, 2048, and 4096 CPU cores) that generate 30 GB to 1 TB of data, and executed these configurations on diverse HPC platforms (Cray XE6, IBM BG/P, and Dell Cluster). In all cases, the auto-tuning framework identified tunable parameters that substantially improved write performance over default system settings. We consistently demonstrate I/O write speedups between 2x and 100x for test configurations.
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Assessing the impact of ABFT & Checkpoint composite strategies
Algorithm-specific fault tolerant approaches promise unparalleled scalability and performance in failure-prone environments. With the advances in the theoretical and practical understanding of algorithmic traits enabling such approaches, a growing number of frequently used algorithms (including all widely used factorization kernels) have been proven capable of such properties. These algorithms provide a temporal section of the execution when the data is protected by it's own intrinsic properties, and can be algorithmically recomputed without the need of checkpoints. However, while typical scientific applications spend a significant fraction of their execution time in library calls that can be ABFT-protected, they interleave sections that are difficult or even impossible to protect with ABFT. As a consequence, the only fault-tolerance approach that is currently used for these applications is checkpoint/restart. In this talk, we propose a model and a simulator to investigate the behavior of a composite protocol, that alternates between ABFT and checkpoint/restart protection for effective protection of each phase of an iterative application composed of ABFT-aware and ABFT-unaware sections. We highlight this approach drastically increases the performance delivered by the system, especially at scale, by providing means to rarefy the checkpoints while simultaneously decreasing the volume of data needed to be saved in the checkpoints.
Prasanna Balaprakash
Active-Learning-based Surrogate Models for Empirical Performance Tuning
Performance models have profound impact on hardware-software co-design, architectural explorations, and performance tuning of scientific applications. Developing algebraic performance models is becoming an increasingly challenging task. In such situations, a statistical surrogate-based performance model, fitted to a small number of input-output points obtained from empirical evaluation on the target machine, provides a range of benefits. Accurate surrogates can emulate the output of the expensive empirical evaluation at new inputs and therefore can be used to test and/or aid search, compiler, and autotuning algorithms. We present an iterative parallel algorithm that builds surrogate performance models for scientific kernels and work-loads on single-core and multicore and multinode architectures. We tailor to our unique parallel environment an active learning heuristic popular in the literature on the sequential design of computer experiments in order to identify the code variants whose evaluations have the best potential to improve the surrogate. We use the proposed approach in a number of case studies to illustrate its effectiveness.