SBLOCK: A Framework for Efficient Stencil-Based PDE Solvers on Multi-core Platforms

Brandvik, Tobias; Pullan, Graham

doi:10.1109/cit.2010.214

Cited by 22 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Recently domain specific languages and highlevel approaches have received a lot of attention; FEniCS [34], [35] for the solution of PDEs, Liszt [3] for unstructured meshes, and a large number of DSLs for structured meshes and stencil-based computations [4], [5], [36], which all take varying approaches to defining a language and providing programming tools and compilers to exploit domainspcific knowledge and enable execution on different hardware. Recently the COSMO weather code from Switzerland was demonstrated to successfully use a similar domainspecific approach [37].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, a DSL either defines its own language, or embeds into a host language, extending it, therefore it requires advanced compilers and development tools. Even though much research [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] has been carried out on the subject, there has been little conclusive evidence so far, demonstrating the viability of such an approach in developing full scale industrial applications. Indeed, it has been the lack of such an exemplar that has made these high level approaches confined to university research labs and not a mainstream HPC software development strategy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acceleration of a Full-Scale Industrial CFD Application with OP2

Reguly

Mudalige

Bertolli

et al. 2016

IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst.

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Hydra is a full-scale industrial CFD application used for the design of turbomachinery at Rolls Royce plc. It consists of over 300 parallel loops with a code base exceeding 50K lines and is capable of performing complex simulations over highly detailed unstructured mesh geometries. Unlike simpler structured-mesh applications, which feature high speed-ups when accelerated by modern processor architectures, such as multi-core and many-core processor systems, Hydra presents major challenges in data organization and movement that need to be overcome for continued high performance on emerging platforms. We present research in achieving this goal through the OP2 domain-specific high-level framework. OP2 targets the domain of unstructured mesh problems and follows the design of an active library using source-to-source translation and compilation to generate multiple parallel implementations from a single high-level application source for execution on a range of back-end hardware platforms. We chart the conversion of Hydra from its original hand-tuned production version to one that utilizes OP2, and map out the key difficulties encountered in the process. To our knowledge this research presents the first application of such a high-level framework to a full scale production code. Specifically we show (1) how different parallel implementations can be achieved with an active library framework, even for a highly complicated industrial application such as Hydra, and (2) how different optimizations targeting contrasting parallel architectures can be applied to the whole application, seamlessly, reducing developer effort and increasing code longevity. Performance results demonstrate that not only the same runtime performance as that of the hand-tuned original production code could be achieved, but it can be significantly improved on conventional processor systems. Additionally, we achieve further acceleration by exploiting many-core parallelism, particularly on GPU systems. Our results provide evidence of how high-level frameworks such as OP2 enable portability across a wide range of contrasting platforms and their significant utility in achieving near-optimal performance without the intervention of the application programmer.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acceleration of a Full-Scale Industrial CFD Application with OP2

Reguly

Mudalige

Bertolli

et al. 2016

IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst.

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“…It uses algebraic concepts such as tensors, hydrodynamic properties, interpolation methods and other building blocks in describing the PDE solving algorithms. In contrast SBLOCK [12] uses extensive automatic source code generation very much similar to the approach taken by OP2 and OPS, and expresses computations as kernels applied to elements of a set.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These include Firedrake [1], FENiCS [25] and Liszt [14], OP2 [6] for unstructured mesh applications and Paraiso [24], Ypnos [26], Pochoir [30] and SBLOCK [12] for explicit stencil based applications (structured mesh applications).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance Analysis of a High-Level Abstractions-Based Hydrocode on Future Computing Systems

Mudalige

Reguly

Giles

et al. 2015

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. In this paper we present research on applying a domain specific high-level abstractions (HLA) development strategy with the aim to "future-proof" a key class of high performance computing (HPC) applications that simulate hydrodynamics computations at AWE plc. We build on an existing high-level abstraction framework, OPS, that is being developed for the solution of multi-block structured mesh-based applications at the University of Oxford. OPS uses an "active library" approach where a single application code written using the OPS API can be transformed into different highly optimized parallel implementations which can then be linked against the appropriate parallel library enabling execution on different back-end hardware platforms. The target application in this work is the CloverLeaf mini-app from Sandia National Laboratory's Mantevo suite of codes that consists of algorithms of interest from hydrodynamics workloads. Specifically, we present (1) the lessons learnt in re-engineering an industrial representative hydro-dynamics application to utilize the OPS high-level framework and subsequent code generation to obtain a range of parallel implementations, and (2) the performance of the auto-generated OPS versions of CloverLeaf compared to that of the performance of the hand-coded original CloverLeaf implementations on a range of platforms. Benchmarked systems include Intel multi-core CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs, the Archer (Cray XC30) CPU cluster and the Titan (Cray XK7) GPU cluster with different parallelizations (OpenMP, OpenACC, CUDA, OpenCL and MPI). Our results show that the development of parallel HPC applications using a high-level framework such as OPS is no more time consuming nor difficult than writing a one-off parallel program targeting only a single parallel implementation. However the OPS strategy pays off with a highly maintainable single application source, through which multiple parallelizations can be realized, without compromising performance portability on a range of parallel systems.

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“…The performance optimization of stencil computation on regular cartesian grids for high-performance computing applications has also received much attention in computer science research [Datta08], [Brandvik10], [Zhang12], [Henretty13], [Yount15]. The primary focus of most stencil compilers or DSLs, however, is the optimization of synthetic problems which often limits their applicability for practical scientific applications.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimised finite difference computation from symbolic equations

Lange¹,

Kukreja²,

Luporini³

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 16th Python in Science Conference

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Abstract-Domain-specific high-productivity environments are playing an increasingly important role in scientific computing due to the levels of abstraction and automation they provide. In this paper we introduce Devito, an opensource domain-specific framework for solving partial differential equations from symbolic problem definitions by the finite difference method. We highlight the generation and automated execution of highly optimized stencil code from only a few lines of high-level symbolic Python for a set of scientific equations, before exploring the use of Devito operators in seismic inversion problems.

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SBLOCK: A Framework for Efficient Stencil-Based PDE Solvers on Multi-core Platforms

Cited by 22 publications

References 11 publications

Acceleration of a Full-Scale Industrial CFD Application with OP2

Acceleration of a Full-Scale Industrial CFD Application with OP2

Performance Analysis of a High-Level Abstractions-Based Hydrocode on Future Computing Systems

Optimised finite difference computation from symbolic equations

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