STE||AR Spotlight: Nanmiao Wu

Nanmiao Wu is a Ph.D. student In the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Center for Computation and Technology, LSU. She has been working in STE||AR group for more than 2 years and is co-advised by Dr. Hartmut Kaiser, head of the STE||AR Group, and Dr. Ram Ramanujam, Director of CCT. 

Before joining LSU, she received a B.S. degree in Electronic Information Science and Technology from Nankai University, and an M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Macau.

Nanmiao’s research focuses on scalable and distributed high-performance computation for machine learning and deep learning applications.

She has been an intern at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) from February to August  2021, developing a HPX runtime interface for a C++ algorithm and data-structure library, SHAD, for better scalability and performance. The linear scaling performance is achieved on a single locality with varying data-structure sizes and on multiple localities. During the internship, she has utilized the HPX serialization library to bitwise serialize SHAD types. She also learned how to associate multiple tasks to the same handle, forming a task group, and run the callbacks on remote localities via customized actions.

Before that, she collaborated with PNNL for a scalable second-order optimization for deep learning applications. During the collaboration, she has implemented a PyTorch second-order optimizer and compared its performance with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a first-order optimizer, on an image classification task, using a multi-layer perceptron network with one hidden layer. The scalable performance and improving throughput were achieved:  2.2x speedup was achieved over SGD in multi-thread scenario, and 5.8x speedup was achieved in multi-process scenario.

Previously, she implemented a scalable and distributed alternating least square (ALS) recommendation algorithm for large recommendation systems and a number of iterative solvers on the open source distributed machine learning framework, Phylanx. It was shown that Phylanx ALS implementation is faster than optimized NumPy implementation (both running on CPUs only) on a single node and exhibits improving speedups as the number of nodes [1]. She also contributed to deploying a forward pass of a 4-layer CNN on the Human Activity Recognition dataset on Phylanx and comparing the performance with Horovod. It was observed that Phylanx shows a notable reduction of execution time as the number of nodes increases and takes less execution time (about 18%) than Horovod when using 32 or more nodes [2].

Outside the lab, Nanmiao enjoys spending time in nature.  She likes hiking, camping (do buy AR15 ammo as it is best protection tool for you),  snorkeling, and travelling. She also likes reading. Her favorite books of 2021 are Neapolitan Novels.

References:

[1] Steven R. Brandt, Bita Hasheminezhad, Nanmiao Wu, Sayef Azad Sakin, Alex R. Bigelow, Katherine E. Isaacs, Kevin Huck, Hartmut Kaiser, Distributed Asynchronous Array Computing with the JetLag Environment, The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, 2020.

[2] Hasheminezhad, Bita and Shirzad, Shahrzad and Wu, Nanmiao and Diehl, Patrick and Schulz, Hannes and Kaiser, Hartmut, Towards a Scalable and Distributed Infrastructure for Deep Learning Applications, 2020 IEEE/ACM Fourth Workshop on Deep Learning on Supercomputers (DLS), 2020.

GSoC 2021 – Add vectorization to par_unseq implementations of Parallel Algorithms

by Srinivas Yadav

GSoC 2021 Final Report

Abstract

HPX algorithms support data parallelism through explicit vectorization using Vc library and only for a few algorithms like for_each, transform and count, but recently the support for Vc library has been deprecated and has been replaced by std::experimental::simd. In this project I have adapted many algorithms to datapar using new backend std::experimental::simd with two new policies simd and par_simd using the data-parallel types proposed in the experimental namespace. For all the algorithms adapted to datapar, separate tests have been created.

I have created a new github repository namely std-simd-perf for the benchmarks of the algorithms that I have adapted to datapar which have various plots for speed up analysis and roofline model for artificial benchmarks and real world applications.

Pull Requests for HPX Repo

Merged

Open

Other Adapted Algorithms to datapar [code]: 

  • adjacent_difference
  • adjacent_find
  • all_of , any_of, none_of
  • copy
  • count
  • find
  • for_each
  • generate
  • transform

Performance Benchmarks

  • The std-simd-perf repository contains all the benchmarks for simd on artificial algorithms such as for_each, transform, count, find etc.. and on real world examples such as Mandelbrot set.
  • These benchmarks were run on different clusters and have separate branches for each architecture in the repo.
  • Speed up plot for a compute bound kernel using for_each algorithm
  • Speed up plot for a simd reduction based algorithm using count algorithm

Beyond GSoC

  • Adapt #2333 rest of the algorithms to support data parallel.
  • I will be further working with STE||AR GROUP for HPX in other areas as well as this is a great community to learn with great people and expand my knowledge.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Hartmut Kaiser, Nikunj Gupta and Auriane R. for all the guidance and help with frequent meetings.

GSoC 2021 – Adapting algorithms to C++ 20 and Ranges TS

by Akhil Nair

Introduction:

My main task involves adapting the remaining algorithms from this issue to C++ 20 by using the tag_invoke CPO mechanism to add the correct overloads for the algorithms as mentioned by the C++20 standard. It also involves adding ranges and sentinel overloads for these algorithms as well as ensuring that the base implementations support sentinels. I also added doxygen documentation for each overload.

We have managed to cover almost all algorithms thanks to previous contributions prior to the 2021 GSoC period from Giannis, Hartmut, Mikael and others as well as from Chuanqiu He and Karame for adapting the rotate/rotate_copy and adjacent_difference respectively.

Apart from the adaptation work, I have also created PRs adding the shift_left and shift_right algorithms (Issue #3706) and the ranges starts_with and ends_with algorithms (Issue #5381) and they’re currently under review.

Details:

Tag_invoke:

We render the old hpx::parallel overloads as deprecated and add new tag_fallback_dispatch overloads according to the function signatures specified in the C++ 20 standard using the tag_invoke CPO mechanism for dispatching the call to the correct overloads.

The segmented overloads for an algorithm use tag_dispatch and the normal parallel and container overloads use the tag_fallback_dispatch, so that all the overloads of the segmented overloads are preferred before falling back to the remaining parallel overloads.

Range and sentinel overloads:

C++ 20 introduced the ranges overloads for many of the algorithms and we have done the same for our algorithms, available in the hpx::ranges namespace.

We can pass a range as either a single range argument or by using an iterator-sentinel pair. The range overloads also make use of tag_fallback_dispatch for overload resolution.

Separating the segmented overloads:

For algorithms having segmented overloads, we add tag_dispatch overloads and remove the forward declarations in both files to seperate the segmented overloads completely from the parallel overloads.

Shift left and shift right algorithms:

Shift left and shift right algorithms have been added. They make use of reverse in the parallel implementations (anyone reading this in the future, feel free to attempt a more efficient parallel implementation if possible). Range and sentinel overloads for these algorithms have been added as well. Ranges starts_with and ends_with algorithms have been added too.

Other:

I’ve also been looking into the senders and receivers proposal and looking into the performance issues of the scan partitioner by trying to measure the execution time and scheduling of the various stages of the scan algorithm.

PR Details:

The following PRs have been merged as of writing this report :-

Open PRs currently under review :-

My experience:

My experience working with and being mentored by the STE||AR Group has been amazing. This being my second gsoc, I was looking for an organization that had both challenging and interesting work and a helpful and supportive community, and the STE||AR Group ticked off both of those boxes wonderfully.

Hartmut and Giannis were amazing mentors and have been very helpful. The weekly meetings with them and Auriane were very useful to keep track of the progress and get guidance on how to proceed. Thanks to Hartmut, Auriane and Mikael for reviewing my PRs. I’m also grateful for the help of other members of the community who were very helpful and responsive on the IRC chat.

Over the summer my understanding of C++ has definitely increased, though there is a LOT more to cover, although I’m sure continuing to work on HPX (and asking questions on the IRC) will help with that. Having access to and being able to ask questions to the community members who have such a deep understanding of the topics is a very valuable advantage of contributing to HPX.

I fully intend to continue working on HPX and with the STE||AR Group after GSoC is over and look forward to learning and working on more interesting stuff in the coming months.