Dedispersion, the removal of deleterious smearing of impulsive signals by the interstellar matter, is one of the most intensive processing steps in any radio survey for pulsars and fast transients. We here present a study of the parallelization of this algorithm on many-core accelerators, including GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA, and the Intel Xeon Phi. We find that dedispersion is inherently memory-bound. Even in a perfect scenario, hardware limitations keep the arithmetic intensity low, thus limiting performance. We next exploit auto-tuning to adapt dedispersion to different accelerators, observations, and even telescopes. We demonstrate that the optimal settings differ between observational setups, and that auto-tuning significantly improves performance. This impacts time-domain surveys from Apertif to SKA.
In the literature, auto-tuning is considered a viable technique to achieve performance that is both high and portable. In particular, @cite_8 show that it is possible to use auto-tuning to improve performance of even highly-tuned algorithms, and @cite_10 affirm that application specific auto-tuning is the most practical way to achieve high performance on multi-core systems. Highly relevant here is the work of @cite_5 , with whom we agree that auto-tuning can be used as a performance portability tool, especially with OpenCL @. Another attempt at achieving performance portability on heterogeneous systems has been made by @cite_6 , and while their approach focuses on the compiler, it still relies on auto-tuning to map algorithms and heterogeneous platforms in an optimal way. In recent years, we have been working on parallelizing and implementing radio astronomy kernels on multi and many-core platforms , and using auto-tuning to achieve high performance on applications like the LOFAR beam former . What makes our current work different, is that we do not only use auto-tuning to achieve high performance, but measure its impact, and show that the optimal configurations are difficult to guess without thorough tuning.
@cite_5 @cite_10 @cite_6 @cite_8
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In this work, we evaluate OpenCL as a programming tool for developing performance-portable applications for GPGPU. While the Khronos group developed OpenCL with programming portability in mind, performance is not necessarily portable. OpenCL has required performance-impacting initializations that do not exist in other languages such as CUDA. Understanding these implications allows us to provide a single library with decent performance on a variety of platforms. We choose triangular solver (TRSM) and matrix multiplication (GEMM) as representative level 3 BLAS routines to implement in OpenCL. We profile TRSM to get the time distribution of the OpenCL runtime system. We then provide tuned GEMM kernels for both the NVIDIA Tesla C2050 and ATI Radeon 5870, the latest GPUs offered by both companies. We explore the benefits of using the texture cache, the performance ramifications of copying data into images, discrepancies in the OpenCL and CUDA compilers' optimizations, and other issues that affect the performance. Experimental results show that nearly 50 of peak performance can be obtained in GEMM on both GPUs in OpenCL. We also show that the performance of these kernels is not highly portable. Finally, we propose the use of auto-tuning to better explore these kernels' parameter space using search harness. Understanding the most efficient design and utilization of emerging multicore systems is one of the most challenging questions faced by the mainstream and scientific computing industries in several decades. Our work explores multicore stencil (nearest-neighbor) computations --- a class of algorithms at the heart of many structured grid codes, including PDF solvers. We develop a number of effective optimization strategies, and build an auto-tuning environment that searches over our optimizations and their parameters to minimize runtime, while maximizing performance portability. To evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies we explore the broadest set of multicore architectures in the current HPC literature, including the Intel Clovertown, AMD Barcelona, Sun Victoria Falls, IBM QS22 PowerXCell 8i, and NVIDIA GTX280. Overall, our auto-tuning optimization methodology results in the fastest multicore stencil performance to date. Finally, we present several key insights into the architectural tradeoffs of emerging multicore designs and their implications on scientific algorithm development. Trends in both consumer and high performance computing are bringing not only more cores, but also increased heterogeneity among the computational resources within a single machine. In many machines, one of the greatest computational resources is now their graphics coprocessors (GPUs), not just their primary CPUs. But GPU programming and memory models differ dramatically from conventional CPUs, and the relative performance characteristics of the different processors vary widely between machines. Different processors within a system often perform best with different algorithms and memory usage patterns, and achieving the best overall performance may require mapping portions of programs across all types of resources in the machine. To address the problem of efficiently programming machines with increasingly heterogeneous computational resources, we propose a programming model in which the best mapping of programs to processors and memories is determined empirically. Programs define choices in how their individual algorithms may work, and the compiler generates further choices in how they can map to CPU and GPU processors and memory systems. These choices are given to an empirical autotuning framework that allows the space of possible implementations to be searched at installation time. The rich choice space allows the autotuner to construct poly-algorithms that combine many different algorithmic techniques, using both the CPU and the GPU, to obtain better performance than any one technique alone. Experimental results show that algorithmic changes, and the varied use of both CPUs and GPUs, are necessary to obtain up to a 16.5x speedup over using a single program configuration for all architectures. The development of high performance dense linear algebra (DLA) critically depends on highly optimized BLAS, and especially on the matrix multiplication routine (GEMM). This is especially true for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), as evidenced by recently published results on DLA for GPUs that rely on highly optimized GEMM. However, the current best GEMM performance, e.g. of up to 375 GFlop s in single precision and of up to 75 GFlop s in double precision arithmetic on NVIDIA's GTX 280, is difficult to achieve. The development involves extensive GPU knowledge and even backward engineering to understand some undocumented insides about the architecture that have been of key importance in the development. In this paper, we describe some GPU GEMM auto-tuning optimization techniques that allow us to keep up with changing hardware by rapidly reusing, rather than reinventing, the existing ideas. Auto-tuning, as we show in this paper, is a very practical solution where in addition to getting an easy portability, we can often get substantial speedups even on current GPUs (e.g. up to 27 in certain cases for both single and double precision GEMMs on the GTX 280).