# Presentation: 321338

## Techniques for Developing Efficient Petascale Applications

- Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale
- _[http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu](http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/)_
- Parallel Programming Laboratory
- Department of Computer Science
- University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

## Summarizing the state of art

- Petascale
- Very powerful parallel computers are being built
- Application domains exist that need that kind of power
- New generation of applications
- Use sophisticated algorithms
- Dynamic adaptive refinements
- Multi-scale, multi-physics
- Challenge:
- Parallel programming is more complex than sequential
- Difficulty in achieving performance that scales to PetaFLOP/S and beyond
- Difficulty in getting correct behavior from programs

- CharmWorkshop2007

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## Our Guiding Principles

- No magic
- Parallelizing compilers have achievedd close to technical perfection, but are not enough
- Sequential programs obscure too much information
- Seek an optimal division of labor between the system and the programmer
- Design abstractions based solidly on use-cases
- Application-oriented yet computer-science centered approach

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## Application Oriented Parallel Abstractions

- NAMD

- Charm++

- Other Applications

- Issues

- Techniques & libraries

- Synergy between Computer Science Research and Apps has been beneficial to both

- ChaNGa

- LeanCP

- Space-time
- meshing

- Rocket Simulation

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## Enabling CS technology of parallel objects and intelligent runtime systems (Charm++ and AMPI) has led to several collaborative applications in CSE

- PSC PetaScale

## Outline

- Techniques for Petascale Programming:
- My biases: isoefficiency analysis, overdecompistion, automated resource management, sophisticated perf. analysis tools
- BigSim:
- Early development of Applications on future machines
- Dealing with Multicore processors and SMP nodes
- Novel parallel programming models

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## Techniques

- For Scaling to Multi-PetaFLOP/s

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## 1.Analyze Scalability of Algorithms

- (say via the iso-efficiency metric)

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## Isoefficiency Analysis

- An algorithm (*) is scalable if
- If you double the number of processors available to it, it can retain the same parallel efficiency by increasing the size of the problem by *some* amount
- Not all algorithms are scalable in this sense..
- Isoefficiency is the rate at which the problem size must be increased, as a function of number of processors, to keep the same efficiency

- Parallel efficiency= T1/(Tp*P)
- T1 : Time on one processor
- Tp: Time on P processors

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- Vipin Kumar (circa 1990)

## NAMD: A Production MD program

- _NAMD_
- Fully featured program
- NIH-funded development
- Distributed free of charge (~20,000 registered users)
- Binaries and source code
- Installed at NSF centers
- User training and support
- Large published simulations

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## Molecular Dynamics in NAMD

- Collection of [charged] atoms, with bonds
- Newtonian mechanics
- Thousands of atoms (10,000 – 5,000,000)
- At each time-step
- Calculate forces on each atom
- Bonds:
- Non-bonded: electrostatic and van der Waal’s
- Short-distance: every timestep
- Long-distance: using PME (3D FFT)
- Multiple Time Stepping : PME every 4 timesteps
- Calculate velocities and advance positions
- Challenge: femtosecond time-step, millions needed!

- Collaboration with K. Schulten, R. Skeel, and coworkers

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## Traditional Approaches: non isoefficient

- Replicated Data:
- All atom coordinates stored on each processor
- Communication/Computation ratio: P log P
- Partition the Atoms array across processors
- Nearby atoms may not be on the same processor
- C/C ratio: O(P)
- Distribute  force matrix to processors
- Matrix is sparse, non uniform,
-  C/C Ratio: sqrt(P)

- Not Scalable

- In 1996-2002

- Not Scalable

- Not Scalable

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## Spatial Decomposition Via Charm

- Atoms distributed to cubes based on their location
-  Size of each cube :
- Just a bit larger than cut-off radius
- Communicate only with neighbors
- Work: for each pair of nbr objects
- C/C ratio: O(1)
***However: ***
***Load Imbalance***
***Limited Parallelism***

- Cells, Cubes or“Patches”

- Charm++ is useful to handle this

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- Object Based Parallelization for MD:
- Force Decomposition + Spatial Decomposition

- Now, we have many objects to load balance:
- Each diamond can be  assigned to any proc.
-  Number of diamonds (3D):
- 14·Number of Patches
- 2-away variation:
- Half-size cubes
- 5x5x5 interactions
- 3-away interactions: 7x7x7

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## Performance of NAMD: STMV

- No. of cores

- STMV: ~1million atoms

## 2. Decouple decomposition 

- 2. Decouple decomposition
- from Physical Processors

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## Migratable Objects (aka Processor Virtualization)

- Migratable Objects (aka Processor Virtualization)

_**Programmer**__**:**_** [Over] decomposition into virtual processors**
_**Runtime:**_** ****Assigns VPs to processors**
**Enables *****adaptive runtime strategies***
**Implementations: ****Charm++, AMPI**

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## Migratable Objects (aka Processor Virtualization)

- Migratable Objects (aka Processor Virtualization)

- Software engineering
- Number of virtual processors can be independently controlled
- Separate VPs for different modules
- Message driven execution
- Adaptive overlap of communication
- Predictability :
- Automatic out-of-core
- Prefetch to *local stores*
- Asynchronous reductions
- Dynamic mapping
- Heterogeneous clusters
- Vacate, adjust to speed, share
- Automatic checkpointing
- Change set of processors used
- Automatic dynamic load balancing
- Communication optimization

_***Benefits***_

- MPI processes

- Virtual Processors (user-level migratable threads)

_**Programmer**__**:**_** [Over] decomposition into virtual processors**
_**Runtime:**_** ****Assigns VPs to processors**
**Enables *****adaptive runtime strategies***
**Implementations: ****Charm++, AMPI**

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## Parallel Decomposition and Processors

- MPI-style encourages
- Decomposition into P pieces, where P is the number of physical processors available
- If your natural decomposition is a cube, then the number of processors must be a cube
- ...
- Charm++/AMPI style “virtual processors”
- Decompose into natural objects of the application
- Let the runtime map them to processors
- Decouple decomposition from load balancing

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## Decomposition independent of numCores

- LSU PetaScale

- Rocket simulation example under traditional MPI vs. Charm++/AMPI framework
- Benefit: load balance, communication optimizations, modularity

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**Notes:**
In traditional MPI paradigm. The number of partitions of both modules is typically equal to the number of processor P
And although the i’th elements of fluid module and solid module are not connected geometrically in the simulation, they are glued together on the I’th processor.
Under Charm++/AMPI framework, the two modules each get their own set of parallel objects. And the size of the arrays are not restricted or related.
The benefit of this is performance optimizations and better modularity.
Problem: due to the asynchronous method invocation, the flow of control is buried deep into the object code

## Fault Tolerance

- IITB2003

- Automatic Checkpointing
- Migrate objects to disk
- In-memory checkpointing as an option
- Automatic fault detection and restart
- “Impending Fault” Response
- Migrate objects to other processors
- Adjust processor-level parallel data structures

- Scalable fault tolerance
- When a processor out of 100,000 fails, all 99,999 shouldn’t have to run back to their checkpoints!
- Sender-side message logging
- Latency tolerance helps mitigate costs
- Restart can be speeded up by spreading out objects from failed processor

## 3. Use Dynamic Load Balancing

- LSU PetaScale

- Based on the
- Principle of Persistence

_**Principle of persistence**_
- Computational loads and communication patterns tend to persist, even in dynamic computations
- So, recent past is a good predictor or near future

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## Two step balancing

- Computational entities (nodes, structured grid points, particles...) are partitioned into objects
- Say, a few thousand FEM elements per chunk, on average
- Objects are migrated across processors for balancing load
- Much smaller problem than repartitioning entire mesh, e.g.
-  Occasional repartitioning for some problems

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## Load Balancing Steps

- Regular Timesteps

- Instrumented Timesteps

- Detailed, aggressive Load Balancing

- Refinement Load Balancing

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## ChaNGa: Parallel Gravity

- Collaborative project (NSF ITR)
- with Prof. Tom Quinn, Univ. of Washington
- Components: gravity, gas dynamics
- Barnes-Hut tree codes
- Oct tree is natural decomposition:
- Geometry has better aspect ratios, and so you “open” fewer nodes up.
- But is not used because it leads to bad load balance
- Assumption: one-to-one map between sub-trees and processors
- Binary trees are considered better load balanced
- With Charm++: Use Oct-Tree, and let Charm++ map subtrees to processors

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## ChaNGa Load balancing

- dwarf 5M on 1,024 BlueGene/L processors

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- Simple balancers worsened performance!

## Load balancing with OrbRefineLB

- dwarf 5M on 1,024 BlueGene/L processors

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- Need sophisticated balancers, and ability to choose the right ones automatically

## ChaNGa Preliminary Performance

- Developed in Collaboration with Tom Quinn (Univ. Washington) using Charm++

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## Load balancing for large machines: I

- Centralized balancers achieve best balance
- Collect object-communication graph on one processor
- But won’t scale beyond tens of thousands of nodes
- Fully distributed  load balancers
- Avoid bottleneck but.. Achieve poor load balance
- Not adequately agile
- Hierarchical load balancers
- Careful control of what information goes up and down the hierarchy can lead to fast, high-quality balancers

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## Load balancing for large machines: II

- Interconnection topology starts to matter again
- Was hidden due to wormhole routing etc.
- Latency variation is still small..
- But bandwidth occupancy is a problem
- Topology aware load balancers
- Some general heuristic have shown good performance
- But may require too much compute power
- Also, special-purpose heuristic work fine when applicable
- Still, many open challenges

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## OpenAtom

- Car-Parinello ab initio MD
- NSF ITR 2001-2007, IBM

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- G. Martyna
- M. Tuckerman
- L. Kale

## Goal : The accurate treatment of complex heterogeneous   

**Goal : The accurate treatment of complex heterogeneous   **
**                                ****nanoscale systems**

**soft under-layer**

**write ****h****ead**

**read**** ****head**

**bit**

**recording**
**medium**

- Courtsey: G. Martyna

## New OpenAtom Collaboration (DOE)

- Principle Investigators
- G. Martyna (IBM TJ Watson)
- M. Tuckerman (NYU)‏
- L.V. Kale (UIUC)‏‏
- K. Schulten (UIUC)‏
- J. Dongarra (UTK/ORNL)‏
- Current effort focus
- QMMM via integration with NAMD2
- ORNL Cray XT4 Jaguar (31,328 cores)

- A unique parallel decomposition of the Car-Parinello method.
- Using Charm++ virtualization we can efficiently scale small (32 molecule) systems to thousands of processors

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## Decomposition and Computation Flow

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## OpenAtom 

- OpenAtom
- Performance

- BlueGene/L

- BlueGene/P

- Cray XT3

## Topology aware mapping of objects

## Improvements wrought by network  topological aware mapping of computational work to processors

- The simulation of the left panel maps computational work to processors taking the network connectivity into account while the right panel simulation does not . The ``black’’ or idle time processors spent waiting for computational work to arrive on processors is significantly reduced at left. (256waters, 70R, on BG/L 4096 cores)

## OpenAtom: Topology Aware Mapping on BG/L

## OpenAtom: Topology Aware Mapping on Cray XT/3

## 4. Analyze Performance with

- Sophisticated Tools

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## Exploit sophisticated Performance analysis tools

- Exploit sophisticated Performance analysis tools

- We use a tool called “Projections”
- Many other tools exist
- Need for scalable analysis
- A recent example:
- Trying to identify the next performance obstacle for NAMD
- Running on 8192 processors, with 92,000 atom simulation
- Test scenario: without PME
- Time is 3 ms per step, but lower bound is 1.6ms or so..

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## 5. Model and Predict Performance

- Via Simulation

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## How to tune performance for a future machine?

- For example, Blue Waters will arrive in 2011
- But need to prepare applications for it stating now
- Even for extant machines:
- Full size machine may not be available as often as needed for tuning runs
- A simulation-based approach is needed
- Our Approach: BigSim
- Full scale Emulation
- Trace driven Simulation

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## BigSim: Emulation

- Emulation:
- Run an existing, full-scale MPI, AMPI or Charm++ application
- Using an emulation layer that pretends to be (say) 100k cores
- Leverages Charm++’s object-based virtualization
- Generates traces:
- Characteristics of SEBs (Sequential Execution Blocks)
- Dependences between SEBs and messages

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## BigSim: Trace-Driven Simulation

- Trace Driven Parallel Simulation
- Typically on tens to hundreds of processors
- Multiple resolution Simulation of sequential execution:
- from simple scaling to
- cycle-accurate modeling
- Multipl resolution simulation of the Network:
- from simple latency/bw model to
- A detailed packet and switching port level simulation
- Generates Timing traces just as a real app on full scale machine
- Phase 3: Analyze performance
- Identify bottlenecks, even w/o predicting exact performance
- Carry out various “what-if” analysis

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## Projections: Performance visualization

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## BigSim: Challenges

- This simple picture hides many complexities
- Emulation:
- Automatic Out-of-core support for large memory footprint apps
- Simulation:
- Accuracy vs cost tradeoffs
- Interpolation mechanisms
- Memory optimizations
- Active area of research
- But early versions will be available for application developers for Blue Waters next month

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## Validation

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## Challenges of 

- Challenges of
- Multicore Chips
- And SMP nodes

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## Challenges of Multicore Chips

- SMP nodes have been around for a while
- Typically, users just run separate MPI processes on each core
- Seen to be faster (OpenMP + MPI has not succeeded much)
- Yet, you cannot ignore the shared memory
- E.g. For gravity calculations (cosmology), a processor may request a set of particles from remote nodes
- With shared memory, one can maintain a node-level cache, minimizing communication
- Need model without pitfalls of Pthreads/OpenMP
- Costly locks, false sharing, no respect for locality
- E.g. Charm++ avoids these pitfalls, IF its RTS can avoid them

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## Charm++ Experience

- Pingpong performance

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## Raising the Level of Abstraction

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## Raising the Level of Abstraction

- Clearly (?) we need new programming models
- Many opinions and ideas exist
- Two metapoints:
- Need for Exploration (don’t standardize too soon)
- Interoperability
- Allows a “beachhead” for novel paradigms
- Long-term: Allow each module to be coded using the paradigm best suited for it
- Interoperability requires concurrent composition
- This may _*require*_ message-driven execution

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## Simplifying Parallel Programming

- By giving up completeness!
- A paradigm may be simple, but
- not suitable for expressing all parallel patterns
- Yet, if it can cover a significant classes of patters (applications, modules), it is useful
*A collection of incomplete models, backed by a few complete ones, will do the trick*
- Our own examples: both outlaw non-determinism
- Multiphase Shared Arrays (MSA): restricted shared memory
- LCPC ‘04
- Charisma: Static data flow among collections of objects
- LCR’04, HPDC ‘07

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## MSA: 

- SBAC-PAD PetaScale

- MSA:

- In the simple model:
- A program consists of
- A collection of Charm threads, and
- Multiple collections of data-arrays
- Partitioned into pages          (user-specified)
- Each array is in one mode at a time
- But its mode may change from phase to phase
- Modes
- Write-once
- Read-only
- Accumulate
- Owner-computes

- A

- B

- C

- C

- C

- C

## A View of an Interoperable Future

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## Summary

- Petascale Applications will require a large toolbox; My pet tools/techniques:
- Scalable Algorithms with isoefficiency analysis
- Object-based decomposition
- Dynamic Load balancing
- Scalable Performance analysis
- Early performance tuning via BigSim
- Multicore chips, SMP nodes, accelerators
- Require extra programming effort with locality-respecting models
- Raise the level of abstraction
- Via “Incomplete yet simple” paradigms, and
- domain-specific frameworks

- More Info: http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu /

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