High-performance computing (HPC) is recognized as one of the pillars for further progress in science, industry, medicine, and education. Current HPC systems are being developed to overcome emerging architectural challenges in order to reach Exascale level of performance, projected for the year 2020. The much larger embedded and mobile market allows for rapid development of intellectual property (IP) blocks and provides more flexibility in designing an application-specific system-on-chip (SoC), in turn providing the possibility in balancing performance, energy-efficiency, and cost. In the Mont-Blanc project, we advocate for HPC systems being built from such commodity IP blocks, currently used in embedded and mobile SoCs. As a first demonstrator of such an approach, we present the Mont-Blanc prototype; the first HPC system built with commodity SoCs, memories, and network interface cards (NICs) from the embedded and mobile domain, and off-the-shelf HPC networking, storage, cooling, and integration solutions. We present the system's architecture and evaluate both performance and energy efficiency. Further, we compare the system's abilities against a production level supercomputer. At the end, we discuss parallel scalability and estimate the maximum scalability point of this approach across a set of applications.

New Results - The Mont-Blanc prototype: An Alternative Approach for HPC Systems

With the development of computer architecture, even for embedded systems, GPU devices can be integrated, providing outstanding performance and energy efficiency to meet the requirements of different industries, applications, and deployment environments. Data analytics is an important application scenario for embedded systems. Unfortunately, due to the limitation of the capacity of the embedded device, the scale of problems handled by the embedded system is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel data analytics method, called G-TADOC, for efficient text analytics directly on compression on embedded GPU systems. A large amount of data can be compressed and stored in embedded systems, and can be processed directly in the compressed state, which greatly enhances the processing capabilities of the systems. Particularly, G-TADOC has three innovations. First, a novel fine-grained thread-level workload scheduling strategy for GPU threads has been developed, which partitions heavily-dependent loads adaptively in a fine-grained manner. Second, a GPU thread-safe memory pool has been developed to handle inconsistency with low synchronization overheads. Third, a sequence-support strategy is provided to maintain high GPU parallelism while ensuring sequence information for lossless compression. Moreover, G-TADOC involves special optimizations for embedded GPUs, such as utilizing the CPU-GPU shared unified memory. Experiments show that G-TADOC provides 13.2× average speedup compared to the state-of-the-art TADOC. G-TADOC also improves performance-per-cost by 2.6× and energy efficiency by 32.5× over TADOC.

Exploring Data Analytics Without Decompression on Embedded GPU Systems

With the development of computer architecture, even for embedded systems, GPU devices can be integrated, providing outstanding performance and energy efficiency to meet the requirements of different industries, applications, and deployment environments. Data analytics is an important application scenario for embedded systems. Unfortunately, due to the limitation of the capacity of the embedded device, the scale of problems handled by the embedded system is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel data analytics method, called G-TADOC, for efficient text analytics directly on compression on embedded GPU systems. A large amount of data can be compressed and stored in embedded systems, and can be processed directly in the compressed state, which greatly enhances the processing capabilities of the systems. Particularly, G-TADOC has three innovations. First, a novel fine-grained thread-level workload scheduling strategy for GPU threads has been developed, which partitions heavily-dependent loads adaptively in a fine-grained manner. Second, a GPU thread-safe memory pool has been developed to handle inconsistency with low synchronization overheads. Third, a sequence-support strategy is provided to maintain high GPU parallelism while ensuring sequence information for lossless compression. Moreover, G-TADOC involves special optimizations for embedded GPUs, such as utilizing the CPU-GPU shared unified memory. Experiments show that G-TADOC provides 13.2× average speedup compared to the state-of-the-art TADOC. G-TADOC also improves performance-per-cost by 2.6× and energy efficiency by 32.5× over TADOC. 

As the era of exascale supercomputing is coming, it is vital for next-generation supercomputers to find appropriate applications with high social and economic benefit. In recent years, it has been widely accepted that extremely-large graph computation is a promising killer application for supercomputing. Although Tianhe series supercomputers are leading in the world-wide competition of supercomputing (ranked No. 1 in the Top500 list for six times), previously they had been inefficient in graph computation according to the Graph500 list. This is mainly because the previous graph processing system cannot leverage the advanced hardware features of Tianhe supercomputers. To address the problem, in this paper we present our integrated optimizations for improving the graph computation performance on our next-generation Tianhe supercomputing system, mainly including sorting with buffering for heavy vertices, vectorized searching with SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) on matrix2000+ CPUs, and group communication on the proprietary interconnection network. Performance evaluation on a subset of the Tianhe supercomputer (with 512 nodes and 196,608 cores) shows that our customized graph processing system effectively improves the graph search performance and achieves the BFS performance of 2131.98 GTEPS.

TianheGraph: Customizing Graph Search for Graph500 on Tianhe Supercomputer

With the ever‐growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)‐based systems, the carbon footprint of AI is no longer negligible. AI researchers and practitioners are therefore urged to hold themselves accountable for the carbon emissions of the AI models they design and use. This led in recent years to the appearance of researches tackling AI environmental sustainability, a field referred to as Green AI. Despite the rapid growth of interest in the topic, a comprehensive overview of Green AI research is to date still missing. To address this gap, in this article, we present a systematic review of the Green AI literature. From the analysis of 98 primary studies, different patterns emerge. The topic experienced a considerable growth from 2020 onward. Most studies consider monitoring AI model footprint, tuning hyperparameters to improve model sustainability, or benchmarking models. A mix of position papers, observational studies, and solution papers are present. Most papers focus on the training phase, are algorithm‐agnostic or study neural networks, and use image data. Laboratory experiments are the most common research strategy. Reported Green AI energy savings go up to 115%, with savings over 50% being rather common. Industrial parties are involved in Green AI studies, albeit most target academic readers. Green AI tool provisioning is scarce. As a conclusion, the Green AI research field results to have reached a considerable level of maturity. Therefore, from this review emerges that the time is suitable to adopt other Green AI research strategies, and port the numerous promising academic results to industrial practice.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/widm.1507

A systematic review of Green AI

Brief Introduction of TianHe Exascale Prototype System

A Holistic Energy-Efficient Approach for a Processor-Memory System

Deep learning has achieved accuracy and fast training speed and has been successfully applied to many fields, including speech recognition, text processing, image processing and video processing. However, the cost of high power and energy comes together with the high accuracy and training speed of Deep Neural Network (DNN). This inspires researchers to perform characterization in terms of performance, power and energy for guiding the architecture design of DNN models. There are three critical issues to solve for designing a both accurate and energy-efficient DNN model: i) how the software parameters affect the DNN models; ii) how the hardware parameters affect the DNN models; and iii) how to choose the best energy-efficient DNN model. To answer the three issues above, we capture and analyze the performance, power and energy behaviors for multiple experiment settings. We evaluate four DNN models (i.e., LeNet, GoogLeNet, AlexNet, and CaffeNet) with various parameter settings (both hardware and software) on both CPU and GPU platforms. Evaluation results provide detailed DNN characterization and some key insights to facilitate the design of energy-efficient deep learning solutions.

Juan Chen

Papers

Brief Introduction of TianHe Exascale Prototype System

A Holistic Energy-Efficient Approach for a Processor-Memory System

Evaluating Performance, Power and Energy of Deep Neural Networks on CPUs and GPUs

More bang for your buck: Boosting performance with capped power consumption

Towards connecting discrete mathematics and software engineering