Milinda Fernando

dblp:169/1086 · DBLP profile ↗
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8ranked-venue papers
3as first author
4since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-5502-9367ORCID · corroborated

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

Systems, architecture and hardware · 8 · 3 first-author · 4 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Real-Time Bayesian Inference at Extreme Scale: A Digital Twin for Tsunami Early Warning Applied to the Cascadia Subduction Zone
abstract
We present a Bayesian inversion-based digital twin that employs acoustic pressure data from seafloor sensors, along with 3D coupled acoustic–gravity wave equations, to infer earthquake-induced spatiotemporal seafloor motion in real time and forecast tsunami propagation toward coastlines for early warning with quantified uncertainties. Our target is the Cascadia subduction zone, with one billion parameters. Computing the posterior mean alone would require 50 years on a 512 GPU machine. Instead, exploiting the shift invariance of the parameter-to-observable map and devising novel parallel algorithms, we induce a fast offline–online decomposition. The offline component requires just one adjoint wave propagation per sensor; using MFEM, we scale this part of the computation to the full El Capitan system (43,520 GPUs) with 92% weak parallel efficiency. Moreover, given real-time data, the online component exactly solves the Bayesian inverse and forecasting problems in 0.2 seconds on a modest GPU system, a ten-billion-fold speedup.
Stefan Henneking, Sreeram Venkat, Veselin Dobrev, John Camier, Tzanio V. Kolev, Milinda Fernando, Alice-Agnes Gabriel, Omar Ghattas
SC6
2022 A scalable adaptive-matrix SPMV for heterogeneous architectures
abstract
In most computational codes, the core computational kernel is the Sparse Matrix-Vector product (SpMV) that enables specialized linear algebra libraries like PETSc to be used, especially in the distributed memory setting. However, optimizing SpMvperformance and scalability at all levels of a modern heterogeneous architecture can be challenging as it is characterized by irregular memory access. This work presents a hybrid approach (HyMV) for evaluating SpMV for matrices arising from PDE discretization schemes such as the finite element method (FEM). The approach enables localized structured memory access that provides improved performance and scalability. Additionally, it simplifies the programmability and portability on different architectures. The developed HyMV approach enables efficient parallelization using MPI, SIMD, OpenMP, and CUDA with minimum programming effort. We present a detailed comparison of HyMV with the two traditional approaches in computational code, matrix-assembled and matrix-free approaches, for structured and unstructured meshes. Our results demonstrate that the HyMV approach achieves excellent scalability and outperforms both approaches, e.g., achieving average speedups of 11x for matrix setup, 1.7x for SpMV with structured meshes, 3.6x for SpMV with unstructured meshes, and 7.5x for GPU SpMV.
Han D. Tran, Milinda Fernando, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Robert M. Kirby, Hari Sundar
IPDPS2
2022 A GPU-Accelerated AMR Solver for Gravitational Wave Propagation
abstract
Simulations to calculate a single gravitational waveform (GW) can take several weeks. Yet, thousands of such simulations are needed for the detection and interpretation of gravitational waves. Future detectors will require even more accurate waveforms than those currently used. We present here the first large scale, adaptive mesh, multi-GPU numerical relativity (NR) code together with performance analysis and benchmarking. While comparisons are difficult to make, our GPU extension of the Dendro-grNr code achieves a 6x speedup over existing state-of-the-art codes. We achieve 800 GFlops/s on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU with an overall 2.5x speedup over a two-socket, 128-core AMD EPYC 7763 CPU node with an equivalent CPU implementation. We present detailed performance analyses, parallel scalability results, and accuracy assessments for GWs computed for mass ratios$\mathrm{q}=1,2,4$., We also present strong scalability up to 8 A100s and weak scaling up to 229,376 x86 cores on the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Frontera system.
Milinda Fernando, David Neilsen, Eric W. Hirschmann, Yosef Zlochower, Hari Sundar, Omar Ghattas, George Biros
SC1
2021 Scalable adaptive PDE solvers in arbitrary domains
abstract
Efficiently and accurately simulating partial differential equations (PDEs) in and around arbitrarily defined geometries, especially with high levels of adaptivity, has significant implications for different application domains. A key bottleneck in the above process is the fast construction of a `good' adaptively-refined mesh. In this work, we present an efficient novel octree-based adaptive discretization approach capable of carving out arbitrarily shaped void regions from the parent domain: an essential requirement for fluid simulations around complex objects. Carving out objects produces an incomplete octree. We develop efficient top-down and bottom-up traversal methods to perform finite element computations on incomplete octrees. We validate the framework by (a) showing appropriate convergence analysis and (b) computing the drag coefficient for flow past a sphere for a wide range of Reynolds numbers (O(1 - 106)) encompassing the drag crisis regime. Finally, we deploy the framework on a realistic geometry on a current project to evaluate COVID-19 transmission risk in classrooms.
Masado Ishii, Milinda Fernando, Boshun Gao, Kendrick Tan, Ming-Chen Hsu, Adarsh Krishnamurthy, Hari Sundar, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian
SC3
2019 A scalable framework for adaptive computational general relativity on heterogeneous clusters
abstract
We present a portable and highly-scalable framework that targets problems in the astrophysics and numerical relativity communities. This framework combines together the parallel Dendro octree with wavelet adaptive multiresolution and an automatic code-generation physics module to solve the Einstein equations of general relativity in the BSSNOK formulation. The goal of this work is to perform advanced, massively parallel numerical simulations of binary black hole and neutron star mergers, including Intermediate Mass Ratio Inspirals (IMRIs) of binary black holes with mass ratios on the order of 100:1. These studies will be used to study waveforms for use in LIGO data analysis and to calibrate approximate methods for generating gravitational waveforms. The key contribution of this work is the development of automatic code generators for computational relativity supporting SIMD vectorization, OpenMP, and CUDA combined with efficient distributed memory adaptive data-structures. These have enabled the development of efficient codes that demonstrate excellent weak scalability up to 131K cores on ORNL's Titan for binary mergers for mass ratios up to 100.
Milinda Fernando, David Neilsen, Eric W. Hirschmann, Hari Sundar
ICS1
2019 Solving PDEs in space-time: 4D tree-based adaptivity, mesh-free and matrix-free approaches
abstract
Numerically solving partial differential equations (PDEs) remains a compelling application of supercomputing resources. The next generation of computing resources - exhibiting increased parallelism and deep memory hierarchies - provide an opportunity to rethink how to solve PDEs, especially time dependent PDEs. Here, we consider time as an additional dimension and simultaneously solve for the unknown in large blocks of time (i.e. in 4D space-time), instead of the standard approach of sequential time-stepping. We discretize the 4D space-time domain using a mesh-free kD tree construction that enables good parallel performance as well as on-the-fly construction of adaptive 4D meshes. To best use the 4D space-time mesh adaptivity, we invoke concepts from PDE analysis to establish rigorous a posteriori error estimates for a general class of PDEs. We solve canonical linear as well as non-linear PDEs (heat diffusion, advection-diffusion, and Allen-Cahn) in space-time, and illustrate the following advantages: (a) sustained scaling behavior across a larger processor count compared to sequential time-stepping approaches, (b) the ability to capture "localized" behavior in space and time using the adaptive space-time mesh, and (c) removal of any time-stepping constraints like the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition, as well as the ability to utilize spatially varying time-steps. We believe that the algorithmic and mathematical developments along with efficient deployment on modern architectures shown in this work constitute an important step towards improving the scalability of PDE solvers on the next generation of supercomputers.
Masado Ishii, Milinda Fernando, Biswajit Khara, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Hari Sundar
SC2
2017 Machine and Application Aware Partitioning for Adaptive Mesh Refinement Applications
abstract
Load balancing and partitioning are critical when it comes to parallel computations. Popular partitioning strategies based on space filling curves focus on equally dividing work. The partitions produced are independent of the architecture or the application. Given the ever-increasing relative cost of data movement and increasing heterogeneity of our architectures, it is no longer sufficient to only consider an equal partitioning of work. Minimizing communication costs are equally if not more important. Our hypothesis is that an unequal partitioning that minimizes communication costs significantly can scale and perform better than conventional equal-work partitioning schemes. This tradeoff is dependent on the architecture as well as the application. We validate our hypothesis in the context of a finite-element computation utilizing adaptive mesh-refinement. Our central contribution is a new partitioning scheme that minimizes the overall runtime of subsequent computations by performing architecture and application-aware non-uniform work assignment in order to decrease time to solution, primarily by minimizing data-movement. We evaluate our algorithm by comparing it against standard space-filling curve based partitioning algorithms and observing time-to-solution as well as energy-to-solution for solving Finite Element computations on adaptively refined meshes. We demonstrate excellent scalability of our new partition algorithm up to $262,144$ cores on ORNL's Titan and demonstrate that the proposed partitioning scheme reduces overall energy as well as time-to-solution for application codes by up to 22.0%
Milinda Fernando, Dmitry Duplyakin, Hari Sundar
HPDC1
2017 A Scalable Hierarchical Semi-Separable Library for Heterogeneous Clusters
abstract
We present a scalable distributed memory library for generating and computations involving structured dense matrices, such as those produced by boundary integral equation formulations. Such matrices are dense, but have special structure that can be exploited to obtain efficient storage and matrix-vector product evaluations and consequently the fast solution of linear systems. At the core of the methods we use is the observation that off-diagonal matrix blocks of such matrices have a low numerical rank, and that this property can be exploited in a multi-level fashion. In this work we focus on the Hierarchically Semi-Separable (HSS) representation. We present algorithms for building and using HSS representations that are parallelized using MPI and CUDA to leverage state-of-the-art heterogeneous clusters. The efficiency of our methods and implementation is demonstrated on large dense matrices obtained from a boundary integral equation formulation of the Laplace equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions. We demonstrate excellent (linear) scalability on up to 128 GPUs on 128 nodes. Our codes will lay the foundation for fast direct solvers for elliptic problems.
Isuru Dilanka Fernando, Sanath Jayasena, Milinda Fernando, Hari Sundar
ICPP3