X10 for high-performance scientific computing
Date
2015
Authors
Milthorpe, Joshua John
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Abstract
High performance computing is a key technology that enables large-scale physical
simulation in modern science. While great advances have been made in methods and
algorithms for scientific computing, the most commonly used programming models
encourage a fragmented view of computation that maps poorly to the underlying
computer architecture.
Scientific applications typically manifest physical locality, which means that interactions
between entities or events that are nearby in space or time are stronger
than more distant interactions. Linear-scaling methods exploit physical locality by approximating
distant interactions, to reduce computational complexity so that cost is
proportional to system size. In these methods, the computation required for each
portion of the system is different depending on that portion’s contribution to the
overall result. To support productive development, application programmers need
programming models that cleanly map aspects of the physical system being simulated
to the underlying computer architecture while also supporting the irregular
workloads that arise from the fragmentation of a physical system.
X10 is a new programming language for high-performance computing that uses
the asynchronous partitioned global address space (APGAS) model, which combines
explicit representation of locality with asynchronous task parallelism. This thesis
argues that the X10 language is well suited to expressing the algorithmic properties
of locality and irregular parallelism that are common to many methods for physical
simulation.
The work reported in this thesis was part of a co-design effort involving researchers
at IBM and ANU in which two significant computational chemistry codes
were developed in X10, with an aim to improve the expressiveness and performance
of the language. The first is a Hartree–Fock electronic structure code, implemented
using the novel Resolution of the Coulomb Operator approach. The second evaluates
electrostatic interactions between point charges, using either the smooth particle
mesh Ewald method or the fast multipole method, with the latter used to simulate
ion interactions in a Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance mass spectrometer.
We compare the performance of both X10 applications to state-of-the-art software
packages written in other languages.
This thesis presents improvements to the X10 language and runtime libraries for
managing and visualizing the data locality of parallel tasks, communication using
active messages, and efficient implementation of distributed arrays. We evaluate these improvements in the context of computational chemistry application examples.
This work demonstrates that X10 can achieve performance comparable to established
programming languages when running on a single core. More importantly,
X10 programs can achieve high parallel efficiency on a multithreaded architecture,
given a divide-and-conquer pattern parallel tasks and appropriate use of worker-local
data. For distributed memory architectures, X10 supports the use of active messages
to construct local, asynchronous communication patterns which outperform global,
synchronous patterns. Although point-to-point active messages may be implemented
efficiently, productive application development also requires collective communications;
more work is required to integrate both forms of communication in the X10
language. The exploitation of locality is the key insight in both linear-scaling methods and
the APGAS programming model; their combination represents an attractive opportunity
for future co-design efforts.
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parallel programming models, asynchronous partitioned global address space (APGAS), high performance scientific computing, computational chemistry
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