On the Impact of Execution Models: A Case Study in Computational Chemistry
Efficient utilization of high-performance computing (HPC) platforms is an important and complex problem. Execution models, abstract descriptions of the dynamic runtime behavior of the execution stack, have significant impact on the utilization of HPC systems. Using a computational chemistry kernel as a case study and a wide variety of execution models combined with load balancing techniques, we explore the impact of execution models on the utilization of an HPC system. We demonstrate a 50 percent improvement in performance by using work stealing relative to a more traditional static scheduling approach. We also use a novel semi-matching technique for load balancing that has comparable performance to a traditional hypergraph-based partitioning implementation, which is computationally expensive. Using this study, we found that execution model design choices and assumptions can limit critical optimizations such as global, dynamic load balancing and finding the correct balance between available work units and different system and runtime overheads. With the emergence of multi- and many-core architectures and the consequent growth in the complexity of HPC platforms, we believe that these lessons will be beneficial to researchers tuning diverse applications on modern HPC platforms, especially on emerging dynamic platforms with energy-induced performance variability.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 1236313
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-108382; KJ0402000
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Joint International Workshop on High-level Parallel Programming Models and Supportive Environments (HIPS) and Large-Scale Parallel Processing (LSPP), held in conjunction with the 29th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium Workshop (IPDPSW 2015), May 25-29, 2015, Hyderabad, India, 255-264
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Data Locality Enhancement of Dynamic Simulations for Exascale Computing (Final Report)
$\mathrm{RADICAL}$-Pilot and $\mathrm{PMIx}$/$\mathrm{PRRTE}$: Executing Heterogeneous Workloads at Large Scale on Partitioned $\mathrm{HPC}$ Resources