Abstractions and Middleware for Petascale Computing and Beyond

Abstractions and Middleware for Petascale Computing and Beyond

Ivo F. Sbalzarini (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
Copyright: © 2010 |Pages: 17
DOI: 10.4018/jdst.2010040103


As high-performance computing moves to the petascale and beyond, a number of algorithmic and software challenges need to be addressed. This paper reviews the main performance-limiting factors in today’s high-performance computing software and outlines a possible new programming paradigm to address them. The proposed paradigm is based on abstract parallel data structures and operations that encapsulate much of the complexity of an application, but still make communication overhead explicit. The authors argue that all numerical simulations can be formulated in terms of the presented abstractions, which thus define an abstract semantic specification language for parallel numerical simulations. Simulations defined in this language can automatically be translated to source code containing the appropriate calls to a middleware that implements the underlying abstractions. Finally, the structure and functionality of such a middleware are outlined while demonstrating its feasibility on the example of the parallel particle-mesh library (PPM).
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Numerical simulations are well established as the third pillar of science, alongside theory and experiments. As numerical methods become more powerful, and more data and knowledge become available about complex real-world systems, the simulations become increasingly elaborate. The availability of parallel high-performance computing (HPC) systems has enabled simulations with unprecedented numbers of degrees of freedom. The corresponding simulation codes are mostly tightly coupled, which means that the different processors of the HPC machine need to exchange data (communicate) several times while solving a problem, and not only at the beginning and the end of the simulation. Minimizing the communication overhead is thus key to parallel efficiency. In this article we propose a novel abstraction layer that provides the proper level of granularity to address some of the software challenges the field is facing as we move beyond petascale systems. We focus on tightly coupled simulations as they occur in classical HPC applications in, e.g., material science, fluid dynamics, astrophysics, or computational chemistry, and in emerging user fields such as biology, finance, or social science.

Despite the proliferation of HPC applications to new areas of science, programming and using HPC machines is becoming increasingly difficult. As the performance of single processors has stopped increasing, speedup can only be achieved through parallelism. There is no more “free speedup” for legacy codes. In addition, memory capacity is growing faster than memory bandwidth (aggravated by the fact that several processor cores are sharing a memory bus), such that accessing memory becomes increasingly expensive compared to compute operations. Presently, it takes about one to two orders of magnitude longer to access the main memory than to perform a floating-point multiplication1. In GPUs and other emerging heterogeneous cores this ratio is even higher. Efficient codes should thus minimize memory access counts rather than operation counts. This presents challenges to both the traditional HPC user fields as well as the emerging fields. In traditional fields, well-tested and efficient codes have existed for several decades. These codes are usually large and of limited parallel scalability. They have to be ported to heterogeneous multi-core HPC systems or re-written altogether. For emerging users in biology or social science, there is a high entry hurdle into HPC since parallel programming is notoriously difficult, requires experience, and takes a long time. The predominantly used message-passing paradigm resembles “communication assembly language” with every single point-to-point communication explicitly coded by the programmer. Together, these developments cause several growing gaps in parallel HPC:

  • 1.

    The performance gap: the actual sustained performance of scientific simulation codes is a decreasing fraction of the theoretical peak-performance of the hardware,

  • 2.

    The knowledge gap: efficient use of HPC resources requires more and more specialized knowledge and is restricted to a smaller and smaller community,

  • 3.

    The reliability gap: as machines contain more and more processor cores, the mean-time between failure drops below the typical runtime of a simulation, and

  • 4.

    The data gap: storing, accessing, and analyzing the peta-bytes of data generated by large simulations or experiments (such as those in astronomy or particle physics) becomes increasingly difficult.

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