research

2024

1. Retargeting and Respecializing GPU Workloads for Performance Portability

   I. R. Ivanov, O. Zinenko, J. Domke, and 2 more authors

   In 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO), Mar 2024

   Abs

   In order to come close to peak performance, accelerators like GPUs require significant architecture-specific tuning that understand the availability of shared memory, parallelism, tensor cores, etc. Unfortunately, the pursuit of higher performance and lower costs have led to a significant diversification of architecture designs, even from the same vendor. This creates the need for performance portability across different GPUs, especially important for programs in a particular programming model with a certain architecture in mind. Even when the program can be seamlessly executed on a different architecture, it may suffer a performance penalty due to it not being sized appropriately to the available hardware resources such as fast memory and registers, let alone not using newer advanced features of the architecture. We propose a new approach to improving performance of (legacy) CUDA programs for modern machines by automatically adjusting the amount of work each parallel thread does, and the amount of memory and register resources it requires. By operating within the MLIR compiler infrastructure, we are able to also target AMD GPUs by performing automatic translation from CUDA and simultaneously adjust the program granularity to fit the size of target GPUs. Combined with autotuning assisted by the platform-specific compiler, our approach demonstrates 27% geomean speedup on the Rodinia benchmark suite over baseline CUDA implementation as well as performance parity between similar NVIDIA and AMD GPUs executing the same CUDA program.

2023

1. High-Performance GPU-to-CPU Transpilation and Optimization via High-Level Parallel Constructs

   William S. Moses, Ivan R. Ivanov, Jens Domke, and 3 more authors

   In Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, Mar 2023

   Abs

   While parallelism remains the main source of performance, architectural implementations and programming models change with each new hardware generation, often leading to costly application re-engineering. Most tools for performance portability require manual and costly application porting to yet another programming model.We propose an alternative approach that automatically translates programs written in one programming model (CUDA), into another (CPU threads) based on Polygeist/MLIR. Our approach includes a representation of parallel constructs that allows conventional compiler transformations to apply transparently and without modification and enables parallelism-specific optimizations. We evaluate our framework by transpiling and optimizing the CUDA Rodinia benchmark suite for a multi-core CPU and achieve a 58% geomean speedup over handwritten OpenMP code. Further, we show how CUDA kernels from PyTorch can efficiently run and scale on the CPU-only Supercomputer Fugaku without user intervention. Our PyTorch compatibility layer making use of transpiled CUDA PyTorch kernels outperforms the PyTorch CPU native backend by 2.7\texttimes.

2019

1. HyperX Topology: First at-Scale Implementation and Comparison to the Fat-Tree

   Jens Domke, Satoshi Matsuoka, Ivan R. Ivanov, and 7 more authors

   In Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, Mar 2019

   Abs

   The de-facto standard topology for modern HPC systems and data-centers are Folded Clos networks, commonly known as Fat-Trees. The number of network endpoints in these systems is steadily increasing. The switch radix increase is not keeping up, forcing an increased path length in these multi-level trees that will limit gains for latency-sensitive applications. Additionally, today’s Fat-Trees force the extensive use of active optical cables which carries a prohibitive cost-structure at scale. To tackle these issues, researchers proposed various low-diameter topologies, such as Dragonfly. Another novel, but only theoretically studied, option is the HyperX. We built the world’s first 3 Pflop/s supercomputer with two separate networks, a 3–level Fat-Tree and a 12\texttimes8 HyperX. This dual-plane system allows us to perform a side-by-side comparison using a broad set of benchmarks. We show that the HyperX, together with our novel communication pattern-aware routing, can challenge the performance of, or even outperform, traditional Fat-Trees.