Alexander Breuer

dblp:121/4050 · also Alexander Nikolas Breuer · DBLP profile ↗
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9ranked-venue papers
4as first author
5since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-8145-3877ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Systems, architecture and hardware · 7 · 3 first-author · 4 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Einsum Trees: An Abstraction for Optimizing the Execution of Tensor Expressions
abstract
Einsum is a declarative language for tensor expressions that specifies an output tensor in terms of several input tensors. However, it does not specify how to compute the output tensor from the input tensors. A typical computational backend for the einsum language comprises two parts: First, a contraction path algorithm that breaks down an einsum expression into a sequence of binary tensor contractions. Second, the execution of the binary contractions. For efficient binary contractions, the data layout of the tensors must be optimized. So far, the computation of contraction paths and the optimization of the data layout for single, that is, local, binary tensor contractions have been studied in isolation. For optimizing the overall execution times of einsum expressions, we introduce Einsum Tree IR, an intermediate representation for globally optimizing the data layout for a given contraction path. We illustrate the effectiveness of the approach on a state-of-the-art Arm server processor, an x86 server processor, and an x86 desktop system.
Alexander Breuer, Mark Blacher, Max Engel, Joachim Giesen, Alexander Heinecke, Julien Klaus, Stefan Remke
ASPLOS (2)1
2024 Harnessing Deep Learning and HPC Kernels via High-Level Loop and Tensor Abstractions on CPU Architectures
abstract
During the past decade, Deep Learning (DL) algorithms, programming systems and hardware have converged with the High Performance Computing (HPC) counterparts. Nevertheless, the programming methodology of DL and HPC systems is stagnant, relying on highly-optimized, yet platform-specific and inflexible vendor-optimized libraries. Such libraries provide close-to-peak performance on specific platforms, kernels and shapes thereof that vendors have dedicated optimizations efforts, while they underperform in the remaining use-cases, yielding non-portable codes with performance glass-jaws. This work introduces a framework to develop efficient, portable DL and HPC kernels for modern CPU architectures. We decompose the kernel development in two steps: 1) Expressing the computational core using Tensor Processing Primitives (TPPs): a compact, versatile set of 2D-tensor operators, 2) Expressing the logical loops around TPPs in a high-level, declarative fashion whereas the exact instantiation (ordering, tiling, parallelization) is determined via simple knobs. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach using standalone kernels and end-to-end workloads that outperform state-of-the-art implementations on diverse CPU platforms.
Evangelos Georganas, Dhiraj D. Kalamkar, Kirill Voronin, Abhisek Kundu, Antonio Noack, Hans Pabst, Alexander Breuer, Alexander Heinecke
IPDPS7
2024 Einsum Benchmark: Enabling the Development of Next-Generation Tensor Execution Engines
abstract
Modern artificial intelligence and machine learning workflows rely on efficient tensor libraries. However, tuning tensor libraries without considering the actual problems they are meant to execute can lead to a mismatch between expected performance and the actual performance. Einsum libraries are tuned to efficiently execute tensor expressions with only a few, relatively large, dense, floating-point tensors. But, practical applications of einsum cover a much broader range of tensor expressions than those that can currently be executed efficiently. For this reason, we have created a benchmark dataset that encompasses this broad range of tensor expressions, allowing future implementations of einsum to build upon and be evaluated against. In addition, we also provide generators for einsum expressions and converters to einsum expressions in our repository, so that additional data can be generated as needed. The benchmark dataset, the generators and converters are released openly and are publicly available at https://benchmark.einsum.org.
Mark Blacher, Christoph Staudt, Julien Klaus, Maurice Wenig, Niklas Merk, Alexander Breuer, Max Engel, Sören Laue, Joachim Giesen
NeurIPS6
2022 Next-Generation Local Time Stepping for the ADER-DG Finite Element Method
abstract
High-frequency ground motion simulations pose a grand challenge in computational seismology. Two main factors drive this challenge. First, to account for higher frequencies, we have to extend our numerical models, e.g., by considering anelasticity, or by including mountain topography. Second, even if we were able to keep our models unchanged, simply doubling the frequency content of a seismic wave propagation solver requires a sixteen-fold increase in computational resources due to the used four-dimensional space-time domains. This work presents the Extreme Scale Discontinuous Galerkin Environment (EDGE) in the context of high-frequency ground motion simulations. Our presented enhancements cover the entire spectrum of the unstructured finite element solver. This includes the incorporation of anelasticity, the introduction of a next-generation clustered local time stepping scheme, and the introduction of a completely revised communication scheme. We close the modeling and simulation loop by presenting our new and rich preprocessing, which drives the high problem-awareness and numerical efficiency of the core solver. In summary, the presented work allows us to conduct large scale high-frequency ground motion simulations efficiently, rou-tinely and conveniently. The soundness of our work is underlined by a set of high-frequency verification runs using a realistic setting. We conclude the presentation by studying EDGE's com-bined algorithmic and computational efficiency in a demanding setup of the 2014 Mw 5.1 La Habra earthquake. Our results are compelling and show an improved time-to-solution by over 10 x while scaling strongly from 256 to 1,536 nodes of the Frontera supercomputer with a sustained non-zero performance of 1.91 FP32-PFLOPS.
Alexander Breuer, Alexander Heinecke
IPDPS1
2021 Tensor processing primitives: a programming abstraction for efficiency and portability in deep learning workloads
abstract
During the past decade, novel Deep Learning (DL) algorithms, workloads and hardware have been developed to tackle a wide range of problems. Despite the advances in workload and hardware ecosystems, the programming methodology of DL systems is stagnant. DL workloads leverage either highly-optimized, yet platform-specific and inflexible kernels from DL libraries, or in the case of novel operators, reference implementations are built via DL framework primitives with underwhelming performance. This work introduces the Tensor Processing Primitives (TPP), a programming abstraction striving for efficient, portable implementation of DL workloads with high-productivity. TPPs define a compact, yet versatile set of 2D-tensor operators (or a virtual Tensor ISA), which subsequently can be utilized as building-blocks to construct complex operators on high-dimensional tensors. The TPP specification is platform-agnostic, thus code expressed via TPPs is portable, whereas the TPP implementation is highly-optimized and platform-specific. We demonstrate the efficacy and viability of our approach using standalone kernels and end-to-end DL & HPC workloads expressed entirely via TPPs that outperform state-of-the-art implementations on multiple platforms.
Evangelos Georganas, Dhiraj D. Kalamkar, Sasikanth Avancha, Menachem Adelman, Cristina Anderson, Alexander Breuer, Jeremy Bruestle, Narendra Chaudhary, Abhisek Kundu, Denise Kutnick, Frank Laub, Md. Vasimuddin, Sanchit Misra, Ramanarayan Mohanty, Hans Pabst, Barukh Ziv, Alexander Heinecke
SC6
2019 Tensor-optimized hardware accelerates fused discontinuous Galerkin simulations
Alexander Heinecke, Alexander Breuer, Yifeng Cui
Parallel Comput.2
2016 Petascale Local Time Stepping for the ADER-DG Finite Element Method
abstract
In this work we present a clustered local time stepping (LTS) scheme for the arbitrary high-order derivatives discontinuous Galerkin finite element scheme. By clustering elements of similar time step, our scheme meets regularity requirements of modern hardware through the design of the numerical discretization. We present a detailed description of our clustered local time stepping scheme for the seismic simulation package SeisSol. Our scheme is able to capture homogeneous and heterogeneous time step variations in the computational domain and maintains a large fraction of the theoretical speedup offered by LTS. From an engineering standpoint, our scheme addresses all important performance characteristics of state-of-the-art supercomputers. The combined algorithmic and computational performance results for SeisSol show that we are able to leverage the large potential of local time stepping by reducing time-to-solution by several factors (2.3 - 4.1), sustaining more than 53% of SuperMUC-II's HPL performance, what corresponds to more than 1.5 PFLOPS performance on 86,016 cores.
Alexander Breuer, Alexander Heinecke, Michael Bader
IPDPS1
2014 Petascale High Order Dynamic Rupture Earthquake Simulations on Heterogeneous Supercomputers
abstract
We present an end-to-end optimization of the innovative Arbitrary high-order DERivative Discontinuous Galerkin (ADER-DG) software SeisSol targeting Intel® Xeon Phi coprocessor platforms, achieving unprecedented earthquake model complexity through coupled simulation of full frictional sliding and seismic wave propagation. SeisSol exploits unstructured meshes to flexibly adapt for complicated geometries in realistic geological models. Seismic wave propagation is solved simultaneously with earthquake faulting in a multiphysical manner leading to a heterogeneous solver structure. Our architecture aware optimizations deliver up to 50% of peak performance, and introduce an efficient compute-communication overlapping scheme shadowing the multiphysics computations. SeisSol delivers near-optimal weak scaling, reaching 8.6 DP-PFLOPS on 8,192 nodes of the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. Our performance model projects reaching 18 -- 20 DP-PFLOPS on the full Tianhe-2 machine. Of special relevance to modern civil engineering needs, our pioneering simulation of the 1992 Landers earthquake shows highly detailed rupture evolution and ground motion at frequencies up to 10 Hz.
Alexander Heinecke, Alexander Breuer, Sebastian Rettenberger, Michael Bader, Alice-Agnes Gabriel, Christian Pelties, Arndt Bode, William L. Barth, Xiangke Liao, Karthikeyan Vaidyanathan, Mikhail Smelyanskiy, Pradeep Dubey
SC2
2012 Teaching Parallel Programming Models on a Shallow-Water Code
abstract
We present a software package that supports teaching different parallel programming models in a computational science and engineering context. It implements a Finite Volume solver for the shallow water equations, with application to tsunami simulation in mind. The numerical model is kept simple, using patches of Cartesian grids as computational domain, which can be connected via ghost layers. The Finite Volume method is restricted to piecewise constant approximation in each grid cell, but the computation of fluxes between cells can be based on the simple Lax-Friedrichs method, as well as on versatile approximate Riemann solvers, which allows realistic simulations. We present how this code can be used to study parallelization with CUDA, MPI, OpenMP, and hybrid approaches - and is useful for both introductory lectures in parallel computing and more advanced courses.
Alexander Breuer, Michael Bader
ISPDC1