Graphics Processing Unit Systems Research Articles

Mathematical Analysis for GPU Framework for High Performance Computing with Improved Scalability, Reliability and Seamless Configurability

In the field of High Performance Computing (HPC), which is changing very quickly, using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) has become essential for getting a lot of computing power and speed. This study gives a thorough mathematical analysis of a GPU system that is meant to improve scalability, stability, and configurability, all of which are very important for next-generation HPC apps. The suggested framework uses complex mathematical models and methods to make the best use of GPU resources, cut down on delay, and guarantee strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Scalable parallel processing methods are built into the framework so it can adapt to changing computing needs, making the most of speed and resource use. Fault-tolerant methods that lessen the effects of hardware breakdowns and computing mistakes also improve reliability, making sure that results are always correct and consistent. The framework can be set up in different ways because it is based on flexible design, which makes it easy to change and adapt to the needs of each application without affecting speed. In diverse computer settings, where different apps may have different working needs, this ability to change is very important. The mathematical analysis includes performance measures like speed, delay, and mistake rates, which give a solid basis for judging how well the system works. Additionally, tests comparing the suggested system to current GPU tools show that it is more reliable and scalable. This study helps make better, more reliable computer systems by looking at some of the biggest problems in GPU-based high-performance computing. The results show that using this method can greatly improve the skills of HPC systems, which can lead to progress in scientific study, data analysis, and complex models. In the end, this work shows how advanced GPU systems can help drive innovation in HPC, leading to more powerful, reliable, and flexible computing options.

Sustainable Optimizing Performance and Energy Efficiency in Proof of Work Blockchain: A Multilinear Regression Approach

The energy-intensive characteristics of the computations performed by graphics processing units (GPUs) in proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain technology are readily apparent. The optimization of GPU feature configuration is a complex subject that significantly impacts a system’s energy consumption and performance efficiency. The primary objectives of this study are to examine and improve the energy consumption characteristics of GPUs, which play a crucial role in the functioning of blockchains and the mining of cryptocurrencies. This study examines the complex relationship between GPU configurations and system architecture components and their effects on energy efficiency and sustainability. The methodology of this study conducts experiments involving various GPU models and mining software, evaluating their effectiveness across various configurations and environments. Multilinear regression analysis is used to study the complex relationships between critical performance indicators like power consumption, thermal dynamics, core speed, and hash rate and their effects on energy efficiency and performance. The results reveal that strategically adjusting GPU hardware, software, and configuration can preserve substantial energy while preserving computational efficiency. GPU core speed, temperature, core memory speed, ETASH algorithms, fan speed, and energy usage significantly affected the dependent computational-efficiency variable (p = 0.000 and R2 = 0.962) using multilinear regression analysis. GPU core speed, temperature, core memory speed, fan speed, and energy usage significantly affected efficient energy usage (p = 0.000 and R2 = 0.989). The contributions of this study offer practical recommendations for optimizing the feature configurations of GPUs to reduce energy consumption, mitigate the environmental impacts of blockchain operations, and contribute to the current research on performance in PoW blockchain applications.

Advanced hybrid MRAM based novel GPU cache system for graphic processing with high efficiency

With the rapid development of portable computing devices and users’ demand for high-quality graphics rendering, embedded Graphics Processing Units (GPU) systems for graphics processing are increasingly turning into a key component of computer architecture to enhance computability. The cache system based on traditional static random access memory (SRAM) plays a crucial role in GPUs. But high leakage, low lifetime and poor integration problems deeply plague the science and engineering field. In the paper, a novel magnetic random access memory (MRAM) based cache architecture of GPU systems is proposed for highly efficient graphics processing and computing accelerating, with the merits of high speed, long endurance, strong interference resistance, and ultra-low power consumption. Spin transfer torque-MRAM and spin orbit torque-MRAM are utilized in off-chip and on-chip caches, respectively. A controller design scheme with prefetching modules and optimized cache coherency protocols are adopted. After testing and evaluating with multiple loads, neural network models and datasets, the simulation results show that the proposed system can achieve up to 28%, 56%, and 66.45% optimizations mostly in terms of speed, energy and leakage power, respectively.

A multithreaded CUDA and OpenMP based power‐aware programming framework for multi‐node GPU systems

SummaryIn the article, we have proposed a framework that allows programming a parallel application for a multi‐node system, with one or more graphical processing units (GPUs) per node, using an OpenMP+extended CUDA API. OpenMP is used for launching threads responsible for management of particular GPUs and extended CUDA calls allow to transfer data and launch kernels on local and remote GPUs. The framework hides inter‐node MPI communication from the programmer. For optimization, the implementation takes advantage of the MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE mode allowing: multiple threads handling distinct GPUs as well as overlapping communication and computations transparently using multiple CUDA streams. The solution allows data parallelization across available GPUs in order to minimize execution time and supports a power‐aware mode in which GPUs are automatically selected for computations using a greedy approach in order not to exceed an imposed power limit. We have implemented and benchmarked three parallel applications including: finding the largest divisors; verification of the Collatz conjecture; finding patterns in vectors. These were tested on three various systems: a GPU cluster with 16 nodes, each with NVIDIA GTX 1060 GPU; a powerful 2‐node system—one node with 8 NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs, the second with 4 NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs; a heterogeneous environment with one node with 2 NVIDIA RTX 2080 and 2 nodes with NVIDIA GTX 1060 GPUs. We demonstrated effectiveness of the framework through execution times versus power caps within ranges of 100–1400 W, 250–3000 W, and 125–600 W for these systems respectively as well as gains from using two versus one CUDA streams per GPU. Finally, we have shown that for the testbed applications the solution allows to obtain high speed‐ups between 89.3% and 97.4% of the theoretically assessed ideal ones, for 16 nodes and 2 CUDA streams, demonstrating very good parallel efficiency.

RTGPU: Real-Time GPU Scheduling of Hard Deadline Parallel Tasks With Fine-Grain Utilization

Many emerging cyber-physical systems, such as autonomous vehicles and robots, rely heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to perform important system operations. Since these highly parallel applications are computationally intensive, they need to be accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs) to meet stringent timing constraints. However, despite the wide adoption of GPUs, efficiently scheduling multiple GPU applications while providing rigorous real-time guarantees remains a challenge. Each GPU application has multiple CPU execution and memory copy segments, with GPU kernels running on different hardware resources. Because of the complicated interactions between heterogeneous segments of parallel tasks, high schedulability is hard to achieve with conventional approaches. This paper proposes RTGPU, which combines fine-grain GPU partitioning on the system side with a novel scheduling algorithm on the theory side. Through system and theory co-design, RTGPU achieves superior system throughput and real-time schedulability. In this paper, we start by building a model for the CPU and memory copy segments. Leveraging persistent threads, we then implement fine-grained GPU partitioning with improved performance through interleaved execution. To reap the benefits of fine-grained GPU partitioning and schedule multiple parallel GPU applications, we propose a novel real-time scheduling algorithm based on federated scheduling and grid search with uniprocessor fixed-priority scheduling. Our approach provides real-time guarantees to meet hard deadlines, and achieves over 11% improvement in system throughput and up to 57% schedulability improvement compared with previous work. We validate and evaluate RTGPU on NVIDIA GTX1080Ti GPU systems. Our system side techniques can be applied on mainstream NVIDIA GPUs, and the proposed scheduling theory can be used in general heterogeneous computing platforms which have a similar task execution pattern.

Generic parallel data structures and algorithms to GPU superpixel image segmentation

We propose parallel implementation on GPU (graphics processing unit) system for some generic algorithms applied to superpixel image segmentation problem. The aim is to provide standard algorithms based on generic decentralized data structures that could be easily improved and customized on many optimization problems on parallel platforms. Note that superpixel segmentation are clustering algorithms applied to image processing. Two types of algorithms are presented and implemented on GPU based on common parallel data structures. Firstly, we present a parallel implementation of the well-known k-means algorithm with application to 3D data. It is based on a cellular grid subdivision of space that allows closest point findings in constant optimal time for bounded distributions. Secondly, we present an application of the parallel Boruvka minimum spanning forest algorithm to compute watershed segmentation. Both techniques are fully executed on GPU and share the same data structures that embed disjoint-set-trees and distributed-link-lists. We evaluate our k-means approach with regards to state-of-the-art methods, that are, the well known SLIC algorithm, and the adaptive segmentation approach SPASM. We argue that our implementation has the shortest execution time among the tested methods, with a near real time performance and quasi linear acceleration factor, while it provides more regular shape superpixel segmentation based on hexagonal tessellation. Watershed minimum spanning forest method is presented and evaluated accordingly to the same experimental framework.

Fast infrared radiative transfer calculations using graphics processing units: JURASSIC-GPU v2.0

Abstract. Remote sensing observations in the mid-infrared spectral region (4–15 µm) play a key role in monitoring the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. Mid-infrared spectral measurements from satellite, aircraft, balloons, and ground-based instruments provide information on pressure, temperature, trace gases, aerosols, and clouds. As state-of-the-art instruments deliver a vast amount of data on a global scale, their analysis may require advanced methods and high-performance computing capacities for data processing. A large amount of computing time is usually spent on evaluating the radiative transfer equation. Line-by-line calculations of infrared radiative transfer are considered to be the most accurate, but they are also the most time-consuming. Here, we discuss the emissivity growth approximation (EGA), which can accelerate infrared radiative transfer calculations by several orders of magnitude compared with line-by-line calculations. As future satellite missions will likely depend on exascale computing systems to process their observational data in due time, we think that the utilization of graphical processing units (GPUs) for the radiative transfer calculations and satellite retrievals is a logical next step in further accelerating and improving the efficiency of data processing. Focusing on the EGA method, we first discuss the implementation of infrared radiative transfer calculations on GPU-based computing systems in detail. Second, we discuss distinct features of our implementation of the EGA method, in particular regarding the memory needs, performance, and scalability, on state-of-the-art GPU systems. As we found our implementation to perform about an order of magnitude more energy-efficient on GPU-accelerated architectures compared to CPU, we conclude that our approach provides various future opportunities for this high-throughput problem.

NURA

Multi-application execution in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), a promising way to utilize GPU resources, is still challenging. Some pieces of prior work (e.g., spatial multitasking) have limited opportunity to improve resource utilization, while other works, e.g., simultaneous multi-kernel, provide fine-grained resource sharing at the price of unfair execution. This paper proposes a new multi-application paradigm for GPUs, called NURA, that provides high potential to improve resource utilization and ensures fairness and Quality-of-Service (QoS). The key idea is that each streaming multiprocessor (SM) executes Cooperative Thread Arrays (CTAs) belong to only one application (similar to the spatial multi-tasking) and shares its unused resources with the SMs running other applications demanding more resources. NURA handles resource sharing process mainly using a software approach to provide simplicity, low hardware cost, and flexibility. We also perform some hardware modifications as an architectural support for our software-based proposal. We conservatively analyze the hardware cost of our proposal, and observe less than 1.07% area overhead with respect to the whole GPU die. Our experimental results over various mixes of GPU workloads show that NURA improves GPU system throughput by 26% compared to state-of-the-art spatial multi-tasking, on average, while meeting the QoS target. In terms of fairness, NURA has almost similar results to spatial multitasking, while it outperforms simultaneous multi-kernel by an average of 76%.

A Spectroscopic Diffuse Optical Tomography System for the Continuous 3-D Functional Imaging of Tissue—A Phantom Study

This article demonstrates a spectroscopic diffuse optical tomography (DOT) system for the noninvasive continuous imaging of tissue. The system was built on an embedded system architecture along with an algorithm that performs entire system control, data acquisition, noise-free lock-in detection, and wireless data transmission to a host computer, equipped with a graphics processing unit (GPU). The GPU system executes a fast 3-D DOT spectroscopic image reconstruction algorithm. The algorithm computes Jacobians and solves four different depth-sensitive inverse problems of image reconstruction. The host computer sends commands to the DOT server system and collects data, and simultaneously performs high-speed 3-D spectroscopic image reconstruction to display images in real-time. We designed a configurable optical fiber patch to collect depth-resolved diffused light exiting the imaging media by placing the patch on the surface. The simulation and experimental results from two setups showed the spectroscopic imaging capability of the system to map the concentration of oxyhemoglobin, deoxyhemoglobin, and water, and to characterize the tumor located deep inside the tissue. The proposed system uses low-cost LEDs, photodiode detectors, embedded system, and algorithms to perform high-speed 3-D functional imaging and can be further miniaturized. Our promising results pave the way for the development of a low-cost hand-held spectroscopic DOT system for the real-time onsite functional imaging of biological tissue.

Object Detection with Low Capacity GPU Systems Using Improved Faster R-CNN

Object detection in remote sensing images has been frequently used in a wide range of areas such as land planning, city monitoring, traffic monitoring, and agricultural applications. It is essential in the field of aerial and satellite image analysis but it is also a challenge. To overcome this challenging problem, there are many object detection models using convolutional neural networks (CNN). The deformable convolutional structure has been introduced to eliminate the disadvantage of the fixed grid structure of the convolutional neural networks. In this study, a multi-scale Faster R-CNN method based on deformable convolution is proposed for single/low graphics processing unit (GPU) systems. Weight standardization (WS) is used instead of batch normalization (BN) to make the proposed model more efficient for a small batch size (1 img/per GPU) on single GPU systems. Experiments were conducted on the publicly available 10-class geospatial object detection (NWPU-VHR 10) dataset to evaluate the object detection performance of the proposed model. Experiment results show that our model achieved a 92.3 mAP. This is a 1.7% mAP increase when compared to the best results in the models using the same dataset.

MASK

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) exploit large amounts of threadlevel parallelism to provide high instruction throughput and to efficiently hide long-latency stalls. The resulting high throughput, along with continued programmability improvements, have made GPUs an essential computational resource in many domains. Applications from different domains can have vastly different compute and memory demands on the GPU. In a large-scale computing environment, to efficiently accommodate such wide-ranging demands without leaving GPU resources underutilized, multiple applications can share a single GPU, akin to how multiple applications execute concurrently on a CPU. Multi-application concurrency requires several support mechanisms in both hardware and software. One such key mechanism is virtual memory, which manages and protects the address space of each application. However, modern GPUs lack the extensive support for multi-application concurrency available in CPUs, and as a result suffer from high performance overheads when shared by multiple applications, as we demonstrate. We perform a detailed analysis of which multi-application concurrency support limitations hurt GPU performance the most. We find that the poor performance is largely a result of the virtual memory mechanisms employed in modern GPUs. In particular, poor address translation performance is a key obstacle to efficient GPU sharing. State-of-the-art address translation mechanisms, which were designed for single-application execution, experience significant inter-application interference when multiple applications spatially share the GPU. This contention leads to frequent misses in the shared translation lookaside buffer (TLB), where a single miss can induce long-latency stalls for hundreds of threads. As a result, the GPU often cannot schedule enough threads to successfully hide the stalls, which diminishes system throughput and becomes a first-order performance concern. Based on our analysis, we propose MASK, a new GPU framework that provides low-overhead virtual memory support for the concurrent execution of multiple applications. MASK consists of three novel address-translation-aware cache and memory management mechanisms that work together to largely reduce the overhead of address translation: (1) a token-based technique to reduce TLB contention, (2) a bypassing mechanism to improve the effectiveness of cached address translations, and (3) an application-aware memory scheduling scheme to reduce the interference between address translation and data requests. Our evaluations show that MASK restores much of the throughput lost to TLB contention. Relative to a state-of-the-art GPU TLB, MASK improves system throughput by 57.8%, improves IPC throughput by 43.4%, and reduces applicationlevel unfairness by 22.4%. MASK's system throughput is within 23.2% of an ideal GPU system with no address translation overhead.

Evaluation of the computational efficacy in GPU-accelerated simulations of spiking neurons

To understand the mechanism of information processing by a biological neural network, computer simulation of a large-scale spiking neural network is an important method. However, because of a high computation cost of the simulation of a large-scale spiking neural network, the simulation requires high performance computing implemented by a supercomputer or a computer cluster. Recently, hardware for parallel computing such as a multi-core CPU and a graphics card with a graphics processing unit (GPU) is built in a gaming computer and a workstation. Thus, parallel computing using this hardware is becoming widespread, allowing us to obtain powerful computing power for simulation of a large-scale spiking neural network. However, it is not clear how much increased performance the parallel computing method using a new GPU yields in the simulation of a large-scale spiking neural network. In this study, we compared computation time between the computing methods with CPUs and GPUs in a simulation of neuronal models. We developed computer programs of neuronal simulations for the computing systems that consist of a gaming graphics card with new architecture (the NVIDIA GTX 1080) and an accelerator board using a GPU (the NVIDIA Tesla K20C). Our results show that the computing systems can perform a simulation of a large number of neurons faster than CPU-based systems. Furthermore, we investigated the accuracy of a simulation using single precision floating point. We show that the simulation results of single precision were accurate enough compared with those of double precision, but chaotic neuronal response calculated by a GPU using single precision is prominently different from that calculated by a CPU using double precision. Furthermore, the difference in chaotic dynamics appeared even if we used double precision of a GPU. In conclusion, the GPU-based computing system exhibits a higher computing performance than the CPU-based system, even if the GPU system includes data transfer from a graphics card to host memory.

Parallelization and Performance of the NIM Weather Model on CPU, GPU, and MIC Processors

AbstractThe design and performance of the Non-Hydrostatic Icosahedral Model (NIM) global weather prediction model is described. NIM is a dynamical core designed to run on central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), and Many Integrated Core (MIC) processors. It demonstrates efficient parallel performance and scalability to tens of thousands of compute nodes and has been an effective way to make comparisons between traditional CPU and emerging fine-grain processors. The design of the NIM also serves as a useful guide in the fine-grain parallelization of the finite volume cubed (FV3) model recently chosen by the National Weather Service (NWS) to become its next operational global weather prediction model.This paper describes the code structure and parallelization of NIM using standards-compliant open multiprocessing (OpenMP) and open accelerator (OpenACC) directives. NIM uses the directives to support a single, performance-portable code that runs on CPU, GPU, and MIC systems. Performance results are compared for five generations of computer chips including the recently released Intel Knights Landing and NVIDIA Pascal chips. Single and multinode performance and scalability is also shown, along with a cost–benefit comparison based on vendor list prices.

Real-time computation of parameter fitting and image reconstruction using graphical processing units

In recent years graphical processing units (GPUs) have become a powerful tool in scientific computing. Their potential to speed up highly parallel applications brings the power of high performance computing to a wider range of users. However, programming these devices and integrating their use in existing applications is still a challenging task.In this paper we examined the potential of GPUs for two different applications. The first application, created at Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), is used for parameter fitting during data analysis of μSR (muon spin rotation, relaxation and resonance) experiments. The second application, developed at ETH, is used for PET (Positron Emission Tomography) image reconstruction and analysis. Applications currently in use were examined to identify parts of the algorithms in need of optimization. Efficient GPU kernels were created in order to allow applications to use a GPU, to speed up the previously identified parts. Benchmarking tests were performed in order to measure the achieved speedup.During this work, we focused on single GPU systems to show that real time data analysis of these problems can be achieved without the need for large computing clusters. The results show that the currently used application for parameter fitting, which uses OpenMP to parallelize calculations over multiple CPU cores, can be accelerated around 40 times through the use of a GPU. The speedup may vary depending on the size and complexity of the problem. For PET image analysis, the obtained speedups of the GPU version were more than ×40 larger compared to a single core CPU implementation. The achieved results show that it is possible to improve the execution time by orders of magnitude.

An accelerated framework for the classification of biological targets from solid-state micropore data

Micro- and nanoscale systems have provided means to detect biological targets, such as DNA, proteins, and human cells, at ultrahigh sensitivity. However, these devices suffer from noise in the raw data, which continues to be significant as newer and devices that are more sensitive produce an increasing amount of data that needs to be analyzed. An important dimension that is often discounted in these systems is the ability to quickly process the measured data for an instant feedback. Realizing and developing algorithms for the accurate detection and classification of biological targets in realtime is vital. Toward this end, we describe a supervised machine-learning approach that records single cell events (pulses), computes useful pulse features, and classifies the future patterns into their respective types, such as cancerous/non-cancerous cells based on the training data. The approach detects cells with an accuracy of 70% from the raw data followed by an accurate classification when larger training sets are employed. The parallel implementation of the algorithm on graphics processing unit (GPU) demonstrates a speedup of three to four folds as compared to a serial implementation on an Intel Core i7 processor. This incredibly efficient GPU system is an effort to streamline the analysis of pulse data in an academic setting. This paper presents for the first time ever, a non-commercial technique using a GPU system for realtime analysis, paired with biological cluster targeting analysis.

High-Efficiency Computing Technology for Thermohydrodynamic Lubrication Analysis

ABSTRACTNumerical analysis of thermal hydrodynamic (THD) lubrication is complex and time consuming because of the three-dimensional numerical domain of the solution of the energy equation. To reduce the execution time, many methods for determining solutions for bearing design problems are available; parallel computing technology is crucial for achieving high computational capability and involves using workstations equipped with multicore central processing units and many-core graphics processing units (GPUs). High-performance GPUs have emerged as powerful computing tools for modeling purposes in engineering and science. High-level GPUs depend on thousands of shaders, namely, processor cores. In this study, the traditional successive overrelaxation (SOR) method for solving the Reynolds equation and energy equation was replaced with the two- and three-dimensional red–black SOR methods for parallelizing the governing equations of a GPU system. The results show that a high-level GPU can be used to increase the parallel computing speed in the process of solving THD problems.

GPURFSCREEN: a GPU based virtual screening tool using random forest classifier.

BackgroundIn-silico methods are an integral part of modern drug discovery paradigm. Virtual screening, an in-silico method, is used to refine data models and reduce the chemical space on which wet lab experiments need to be performed. Virtual screening of a ligand data model requires large scale computations, making it a highly time consuming task. This process can be speeded up by implementing parallelized algorithms on a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU).ResultsRandom Forest is a robust classification algorithm that can be employed in the virtual screening. A ligand based virtual screening tool (GPURFSCREEN) that uses random forests on GPU systems has been proposed and evaluated in this paper. This tool produces optimized results at a lower execution time for large bioassay data sets. The quality of results produced by our tool on GPU is same as that on a regular serial environment.ConclusionConsidering the magnitude of data to be screened, the parallelized virtual screening has a significantly lower running time at high throughput. The proposed parallel tool outperforms its serial counterpart by successfully screening billions of molecules in training and prediction phases.

Adaptive Scheduling Framework for Real-Time Video Encoding on Heterogeneous Systems

To challenge real-time encoding of high-definition video sequences on heterogeneous desktop systems, a collaborative central processing units (CPU) + graphics processing unit (GPU) framework for interloop video encoding is proposed herein. The proposed framework considers the overall complexity of the collaborative interloop encoding as a unified optimization problem. Several functional blocks are integrated for simultaneous execution control, automatic data access management, performance characterization, and adaptive scheduling and load balancing. These blocks aim at fully exploiting the performance of heterogeneous devices, asymmetric bandwidth of communication links, and several levels of concurrency between computation and communication. To support a wide range of CPU and GPU architectures, a specific encoding library is developed with highly optimized algorithms for all interloop modules. The experimental results show that the proposed framework allows achieving a real-time encoding of full high-definition sequences in several CPU + GPU systems. It also delivers performance improvements of up to 61.2% over the state-of-the-art solution, while outperforming individual GPU and quad-core CPU executions by more than 2 and 5 times, respectively.

Performance of a projection method for incompressible flows on heterogeneous hardware

Practical experiments on the flow in a lid-driven cavity are carried out to compare the performance of a second-order finite volume Navier–Stokes solver for incompressible fluids employing a projection method, when using various linear solver libraries on central processing units (CPUs) and graphical processing units (GPUs). The goal of the paper is to identify the potential of GPU acceleration using the built-in GPU solvers of PETSc and to provide information if the usage of GPUs is beneficial for this type of fluid solver in terms of performance and implementation effort. Additionally, energy consumption having emerged as another important goal of optimization in high-performance computing is addressed as well. In this study, the solvers available in the PETSc library, which are running on CPU as well as with GPU support, are compared with the solvers provided by the hypre library in a systematic way. The power consumption of the CPU and the GPU during the solution is measured to assess the energy efficiency in terms of the performance-per-Watt ratio. It is found that for the considered numerical scheme the usage of iterative solvers on current GPU systems is not necessarily beneficial, neither in terms of performance nor in terms of energy consumption, since both libraries, PETSc and hypre, provide highly-optimized solvers for massively parallel CPU systems.

Efficient Execution of Microscopy Image Analysis on CPU, GPU, and MIC Equipped Cluster Systems.

High performance computing is experiencing a major paradigm shift with the introduction of accelerators, such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and Intel Xeon Phi (MIC). These processors have made available a tremendous computing power at low cost, and are transforming machines into hybrid systems equipped with CPUs and accelerators. Although these systems can deliver a very high peak performance, making full use of its resources in real-world applications is a complex problem. Most current applications deployed to these machines are still being executed in a single processor, leaving other devices underutilized. In this paper we explore a scenario in which applications are composed of hierarchical data flow tasks which are allocated to nodes of a distributed memory machine in coarse-grain, but each of them may be composed of several finer-grain tasks which can be allocated to different devices within the node. We propose and implement novel performance aware scheduling techniques that can be used to allocate tasks to devices. We evaluate our techniques using a pathology image analysis application used to investigate brain cancer morphology, and our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed scheduling strategies significantly outperforms other efficient scheduling techniques, such as Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time - HEFT, in cooperative executions using CPUs, GPUs, and MICs. We also experimentally show that our strategies are less sensitive to inaccuracy in the scheduling input data and that the performance gains are maintained as the application scales.