scholarly journals A floating-point validation suite for high-performance shared and distributed memory computing systems

Author(s):  
S.K. Ghoshal
Author(s):  
Stefan Westerlund ◽  
Christopher Harris

AbstractThe latest generation of radio astronomy interferometers will conduct all sky surveys with data products consisting of petabytes of spectral line data. Traditional approaches to identifying and parameterising the astrophysical sources within this data will not scale to datasets of this magnitude, since the performance of workstations will not keep up with the real-time generation of data. For this reason, it is necessary to employ high performance computing systems consisting of a large number of processors connected by a high-bandwidth network. In order to make use of such supercomputers substantial modifications must be made to serial source finding code. To ease the transition, this work presents the Scalable Source Finder Framework, a framework providing storage access, networking communication and data composition functionality, which can support a wide range of source finding algorithms provided they can be applied to subsets of the entire image. Additionally, the Parallel Gaussian Source Finder was implemented using SSoFF, utilising Gaussian filters, thresholding, and local statistics. PGSF was able to search on a 256GB simulated dataset in under 24 minutes, significantly less than the 8 to 12 hour observation that would generate such a dataset.


Author(s):  
Franck Cappello ◽  
Sheng Di ◽  
Sihuan Li ◽  
Xin Liang ◽  
Ali Murat Gok ◽  
...  

Architectural and technological trends of systems used for scientific computing call for a significant reduction of scientific data sets that are composed mainly of floating-point data. This article surveys and presents experimental results of currently identified use cases of generic lossy compression to address the different limitations of scientific computing systems. The article shows from a collection of experiments run on parallel systems of a leadership facility that lossy data compression not only can reduce the footprint of scientific data sets on storage but also can reduce I/O and checkpoint/restart times, accelerate computation, and even allow significantly larger problems to be run than without lossy compression. These results suggest that lossy compression will become an important technology in many aspects of high performance scientific computing. Because the constraints for each use case are different and often conflicting, this collection of results also indicates the need for more specialization of the compression pipelines.


Author(s):  
Jack Dongarra ◽  
Laura Grigori ◽  
Nicholas J. Higham

A number of features of today’s high-performance computers make it challenging to exploit these machines fully for computational science. These include increasing core counts but stagnant clock frequencies; the high cost of data movement; use of accelerators (GPUs, FPGAs, coprocessors), making architectures increasingly heterogeneous; and multi- ple precisions of floating-point arithmetic, including half-precision. Moreover, as well as maximizing speed and accuracy, minimizing energy consumption is an important criterion. New generations of algorithms are needed to tackle these challenges. We discuss some approaches that we can take to develop numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science, with a view to exploiting the next generation of supercomputers. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science’.


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