Adapting wave-front algorithms to efficiently utilize systems with deep communication hierarchies

Large-scale systems increasingly exhibit a differential between intra-chip and inter-chip communication performance especially in hybrid systems using accelerators. Processor-cores on the same socket are able to communicate at lower latencies, and with higher bandwidths, than cores on different sockets either within the same node or between nodes. A key challenge is to efficiently use this communication hierarchy and hence optimize performance. We consider here the class of applications that contains wave-front processing. In these applications data can only be processed after their upstream neighbors have been processed. Similar dependencies result between processors in which communication is required to pass boundary data downstream and whose cost is typically impacted by the slowest communication channel in use. In this work we develop a novel hierarchical wave-front approach that reduces the use of slower communications in the hierarchy but at the cost of additional steps in the parallel computation and higher use of on-chip communications. This tradeoff is explored using a performance model. An implementation using the reverse-acceleration programming model on the petascale Roadrunner system demonstrates a 27% performance improvement at full system-scale on a kernel application. The approach is generally applicable to large-scale multi-core and accelerated systems where a differential in communication performance exists.

Research highlights
► We develop a novel implementation of wavefront algorithms for hybrid supercomputers.
► The use of slow communications is reduced but at the cost of increased compute steps.
► The tradeoff is explored for many system configurations using a performance model.
► An implementation on the petascale Roadrunner system demonstrates a 27% improvement.