In this slidecast, Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich presents: Data-Centric Parallel Programming.
The ubiquity of accelerators in high-performance computing has driven programming complexity beyond the skill-set of the average domain scientist. To maintain performance portability in the future, it is imperative to decouple architecture-specific programming paradigms from the underlying scientific computations. We present the Stateful DataFlow multiGraph (SDFG), a data-centric intermediate representation that enables separating code definition from its optimization. We show how to tune several applications in this model and IR. Furthermore, we show a global, datacentric view of a state-of-the-art quantum transport simulator to optimize its execution on supercomputers. The approach yields coarse and fine-grained data-movement characteristics, which are used for performance and communication modeling, communication avoidance, and data-layout transformations. The transformations are tuned for the Piz Daint and Summit supercomputers, where each platform requires different caching and fusion strategies to perform optimally. We show that SDFGs deliver competitive performance, allowing domain scientists to develop applications naturally and port them to approach peak hardware performance without modifying the original scientific code.
Torsten Hoefler is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Before joining ETH, he led the performance modeling and simulation efforts of parallel petascale applications for the NSF-funded Blue Waters project at NCSA/UIUC. He is also a key member of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) Forum where he chairs the “Collective Operations and Topologies” working group. Torsten won best paper awards at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference SC10, SC13, SC14, EuroMPI’13, HPDC’15, HPDC’16, IPDPS’15, and other conferences. He published numerous peer-reviewed scientific conference and journal articles and authored chapters of the MPI-2.2 and MPI-3.0 standards. He received the Latsis prize of ETH Zurich as well as an ERC starting grant in 2015. His research interests revolve around the central topic of “Performance-centric System Design” and include scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling. Download the paper: “Stateful Dataflow Multigraphs: A Data-Centric Model for High-Performance Parallel Programs” Download the MP3 Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter
