Programming for scientific computing on peta-scale heterogeneous parallel systems

Peta-scale high-perfomlance computing systems are increasingly built with heterogeneous CPU and GPU nodes to achieve higher power efficiency and computation throughput. While providing unprecedented capabilities to conduct computational experiments of historic significance, these systems are presently difficult to program. The users, who are domain experts rather than computer experts, prefer to use programming models closer to their domains （e.g., physics and biology） rather than MPI and OpenME This has led the development of domain-specific programming that provides domain-specific programming interfaces but abstracts away some performance-critical architecture details. Based on experience in designing large-scale computing systems, a hybrid programming framework for scientific computing on heterogeneous architectures is proposed in this work. Its design philosophy is to provide a collaborative mechanism for domain experts and computer experts so that both domain-specific knowledge and performance-critical architecture details can be adequately exploited. Two real-world scientific applications have been evaluated on TH-IA, a peta-scale CPU-GPU heterogeneous system that is currently the 5th fastest supercomputer in the world. The experimental results show that the proposed framework is well suited for developing large-scale scientific computing applications on peta-scale heterogeneous CPU/GPU systems.

Heterogeneous parallel computing accelerated iterative subpixel digital image correlation

Parallel computing techniques have been introduced into digital image correlation(DIC) in recent years and leads to a surge in computation speed. The graphics processing unit(GPU)-based parallel computing demonstrated a surprising effect on accelerating the iterative subpixel DIC, compared with CPU-based parallel computing. In this paper, the performances of the two kinds of parallel computing techniques are compared for the previously proposed path-independent DIC method, in which the initial guess for the inverse compositional Gauss-Newton(IC-GN) algorithm at each point of interest(POI) is estimated through the fast Fourier transform-based cross-correlation(FFT-CC) algorithm. Based on the performance evaluation, a heterogeneous parallel computing(HPC) model is proposed with hybrid mode of parallelisms in order to combine the computing power of GPU and multicore CPU. A scheme of trial computation test is developed to optimize the configuration of the HPC model on a specific computer. The proposed HPC model shows excellent performance on a middle-end desktop computer for real-time subpixel DIC with high resolution of more than 10000 POIs per frame.