Brian Van Essen

dblp:57/3302 · also Brian C. Van Essen · DBLP profile ↗
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28ranked-venue papers
5as first author
7since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-2281-7500ORCID · verified

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

Systems, architecture and hardware · 20 · 5 first-author · 5 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 4 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 BOOM: Benchmarking Out-Of-distribution Molecular Property Predictions of Machine Learning Models
abstract
Data-driven molecular discovery leverages artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and generative modeling to filter and design novel molecules. Discovering novel molecules requires accurate out-of-distribution (OOD) predictions, but ML models struggle to generalize OOD. Currently, no systematic benchmarks exist for molecular OOD prediction tasks. We present BOOM, $\textbf{b}$enchmarks for $\textbf{o}$ut-$\textbf{o}f$-$\textbf{d}$istribution $\textbf{m}$olecular property predictions: a chemically-informed benchmark for OOD performance on common molecular property prediction tasks. We evaluate over 150 model-task combinations to benchmark deep learning models on OOD performance. Overall, we find that no existing model achieves strong generalization across all tasks: even the top-performing model exhibited an average OOD error 3$\times$ higher than in-distribution. Current chemical foundation models do not show strong OOD extrapolation, while models with high inductive bias can perform well on OOD tasks with simple, specific properties. We perform extensive ablation experiments, highlighting how data generation, pre-training, hyperparameter optimization, model architecture, and molecular representation impact OOD performance. Developing models with strong OOD generalization is a new frontier challenge in chemical ML. This open-source benchmark is available at https://github.com/FLASK-LLNL/BOOM
Evan R. Antoniuk, Shehtab Zaman, Tal Ben-Nun, Peggy Li, James Diffenderfer, Büsra Sahin, Obadiah Smolenski, Everett Grethel, Tim Hsu, Anna M. Hiszpanski, Kenneth Chiu, Bhavya Kailkhura, Brian Van Essen
NeurIPS13
2022 Parallelizing Graph Neural Networks via Matrix Compaction for Edge-Conditioned Networks
abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a powerful approach for machine learning on graph datasets. Such datasets often consist of millions of modestly-sized graphs, making them well-suited for data-parallel training. However, existing methods show poor scaling due to load imbalances and kernel overheads. We propose an optimized 2D scatter-gather based represen-tation of GNNs that is amenable to distributed, data-parallel training without changing the underlying mathematics of the GNN. By padding graph data to a fixed size on each process, we can simplify data ingestion, make use of efficient compute kernels, equally distribute computation load, and reduce overheads. We benchmark edge-conditioned GNNs with the PCQM4M-LSC and OGB-PPA datasets. Our implementation shows better runtime performance than the state-of-the-art, with a$12\times$strong-scaling speedup on 16 GPUs and an$89.4\times\ \text{weak}$-scaling speedup on 100 GPUs.
Shehtab Zaman, Tim Moon, Tom Benson, Sam Ade Jacobs, Kenneth Chiu, Brian Van Essen
CCGRID6
2022 Scalable Composition and Analysis Techniques for Massive Scientific Workflows
abstract
Composite science workflows are gaining traction to manage the combined effects of (1) extreme hardware heterogeneity in new High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and (2) growing software complexity – effects necessitated by the convergence of traditional HPC with data sciences. Composing, analyzing, and optimizing a composite workflow remains highly challenging as the component technologies are generally developed in isolation and often feature widely varying levels of performance, scalability, and interoperability. In this paper, we propose novel workflow composition and analysis techniques to create and optimize a scalable and effective composite workflow for heterogeneous HPC centers, and define the performance space of variables that impact composite workflow performance. We present PerfFlowAspect, an Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP)-based tool to perform cross-cutting performance analysis of composite workflows and better understand the impact of key performance variables on workflows. Our solution directly addresses AOP concerns that can affect workflow performance and covers the full software lifecycle, ranging from the workflow's initial composition through performance analysis and optimization. We use our science workflow composition techniques to implement the American Heart Association Molecule Screening (AHA MoleS) workflow. Through experimentation, we demonstrate that tuning a single performance variable can improve AHA MoleS workflow performance by a factor of up to 2.45x. Our evaluation suggests that our techniques can significantly enhance the ability of a multi-disciplinary research and development team to create a high performance composite workflow.
Dong H. Ahn, Jeffrey Mast, Stephen Herbein, Francesco Di Natale, Daniel A. Kirshner, Sam Ade Jacobs, Ian Karlin, Daniel Milroy, Bronis R. de Supinski, Brian Van Essen, Jonathan E. Allen, Felice C. Lightstone
e-Science11
2022 Enabling machine learning-ready HPC ensembles with Merlin
Jayson Luc Peterson, Benjamin Bay, Joe Koning, Peter B. Robinson, Jessica Semler, Jeremy White, Rushil Anirudh, Kevin Athey, Peer-Timo Bremer, Francesco Di Natale, Jim Gaffney, Sam Ade Jacobs, Bhavya Kailkhura, Bogdan Kustowski, Steve H. Langer, Brian K. Spears, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Brian Van Essen, Jae-Seung Yeom
Future Gener. Comput. Syst.19
2021 Monitoring Large Scale Supercomputers: A Case Study with the Lassen Supercomputer
abstract
Scalable management of user workloads on large-scale supercomputers remains a challenge due to the tradeoff between capturing adequate detail for analysis from various data sources and minimizing overhead. Co-designed frameworks, such as IBM’s Cluster System Management (CSM), provide a unified approach and novel insights for large-scale cluster management. This paper presents a longitudinal study and detailed analysis of a first-of-its-kind dataset collected by CSM from one of the world’s fastest supercomputers – comprised of over 1.4 million jobs on heterogenous nodes over multiple years. Furthermore, by focusing on a case study for power management, we identify the strengths and limitations of current CSM power measurement techniques in production. We present a deep dive into a large-scale scientific workflow, where finer-grained monitoring reveals power fluctuations at megawatt-levels resulting from the dynamic nature of the application, which are not captured by CSM. We make our unique datasets available to the HPC community, and discuss potential mitigation strategies by analyzing both coarse-grained and fine-grained data.
Tapasya Patki, Adam Bertsch, Ian Karlin, Dong H. Ahn, Brian Van Essen, Barry Rountree, Bronis R. de Supinski, Nathan Besaw
CLUSTER5
2021 SUPER: SUb-Graph Parallelism for TransformERs
abstract
Transformer models have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and they achieve state-of-the-art performance in applications like machine translation, question answering, regression, and summarization. However, training Transformers is challenging because of their large memory and compute requirements. The literature contains several approaches to parallelize training, like layer parallelism and pipeline parallelism, but they are optimized to benefit out-of-core models and they don't exploit the inherent parallelism in Transformer models. Other work uses model parallelism to achieve weak scaling by increasing the model size. In this paper, we propose sub-graph parallelism that provides a significant performance improvement over pure data parallelism with a fixed number of resources, and as an additional technique for strong- and weak-scaling without increasing model capacity. Our technique accelerates the training of Transformer models and we generalize the concept to any neural network with multiple branches. We optimize the communication for sub-graph parallelism and combine it with data parallelism to scale performance up to 1024 GPUs. To decrease communication overheads, we propose a topology-aware scheme that limits inter-node communication. Finally, we empirically compare sub-graph parallelism with pure data parallelism and demonstrate its performance benefits in end-to-end training.
Arpan Jain, Tim Moon, Tom Benson, Hari Subramoni, Sam Ade Jacobs, Dhabaleswar K. Panda 0001, Brian Van Essen
IPDPS7
2021 The Case for Strong Scaling in Deep Learning: Training Large 3D CNNs With Hybrid Parallelism
abstract
We present scalable hybrid-parallel algorithms for training large-scale 3D convolutional neural networks. Deep learning-based emerging scientific workflows often require model training with large, high-dimensional samples, which can make training much more costly and even infeasible due to excessive memory usage. We solve these challenges by extensively applying hybrid parallelism throughout the end-to-end training pipeline, including both computations and I/O. Our hybrid-parallel algorithm extends the standard data parallelism with spatial parallelism, which partitions a single sample in the spatial domain, realizing strong scaling beyond the mini-batch dimension with a larger aggregated memory capacity. We evaluate our proposed training algorithms with two challenging 3D CNNs, CosmoFlow and 3D U-Net. Our comprehensive performance studies show that good weak and strong scaling can be achieved for both networks using up to 2K GPUs. More importantly, we enable training of CosmoFlow with much larger samples than previously possible, realizing an order-of-magnitude improvement in prediction accuracy.
Yosuke Oyama, Naoya Maruyama, Nikoli Dryden, Erin McCarthy, Peter Harrington, Jan Balewski, Satoshi Matsuoka, Peter Nugent, Brian Van Essen
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst.9
2020 Scalable Topological Data Analysis and Visualization for Evaluating Data-Driven Models in Scientific Applications
abstract
With the rapid adoption of machine learning techniques for large-scale applications in science and engineering comes the convergence of two grand challenges in visualization. First, the utilization of black box models (e.g., deep neural networks) calls for advanced techniques in exploring and interpreting model behaviors. Second, the rapid growth in computing has produced enormous datasets that require techniques that can handle millions or more samples. Although some solutions to these interpretability challenges have been proposed, they typically do not scale beyond thousands of samples, nor do they provide the high-level intuition scientists are looking for. Here, we present the first scalable solution to explore and analyze high-dimensional functions often encountered in the scientific data analysis pipeline. By combining a new streaming neighborhood graph construction, the corresponding topology computation, and a novel data aggregation scheme, namely topology aware datacubes, we enable interactive exploration of both the topological and the geometric aspect of high-dimensional data. Following two use cases from high-energy-density (HED) physics and computational biology, we demonstrate how these capabilities have led to crucial new insights in both applications.
Shusen Liu 0001, Jim Gaffney, Jayson Luc Peterson, Peter B. Robinson, Harsh Bhatia, Valerio Pascucci, Brian K. Spears, Peer-Timo Bremer, Dan Maljovec, Rushil Anirudh, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Sam Ade Jacobs, Brian Van Essen, David Hysom, Jae-Seung Yeom
IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph.14
2019 Parallelizing Training of Deep Generative Models on Massive Scientific Datasets
abstract
Training deep neural networks on large scientific data is a challenging task that requires enormous compute power, especially if no pre-trained models exist to initialize the process. We present a novel tournament method to train traditional as well as generative adversarial networks built on LBANN, a scalable deep learning framework optimized for HPC systems. LBANN combines multiple levels of parallelism and exploits some of the worlds largest supercomputers.We demonstrate our framework by creating a complex predictive model based on multi-variate data from high-energy-density physics containing hundreds of millions of images and hundreds of millions of scalar values derived from tens of millions of simulations of inertial confinement fusion. Our approach combines an HPC workflow and extends LBANN with optimized data ingestion and the new tournament-style training algorithm to produce a scalable neural network architecture using a CORAL-class supercomputer. Experimental results show that 64 trainers (1024 GPUs) achieve a speedup of 70.2× over a single trainer (16 GPUs) baseline, and an effective 109% parallel efficiency.
Sam Ade Jacobs, Jim Gaffney, Tom Benson, Peter B. Robinson, Jayson Luc Peterson, Brian K. Spears, Brian Van Essen, David Hysom, Jae-Seung Yeom, Tim Moon, Rushil Anirudh, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Shusen Liu 0001, Peer-Timo Bremer
CLUSTER7
2019 Improving Strong-Scaling of CNN Training by Exploiting Finer-Grained Parallelism
abstract
Scaling CNN training is necessary to keep up with growing datasets and reduce training time. We also see an emerging need to handle datasets with very large samples, where memory requirements for training are large. Existing training frameworks use a data-parallel approach that partitions samples within a mini-batch, but limits to scaling the minibatch size and memory consumption makes this untenable for large samples. We describe and implement new approaches to convolution, which parallelize using spatial decomposition or a combination of sample and spatial decomposition. This introduces many performance knobs for a network, so we develop a performance model for CNNs and present a method for using it to automatically determine efficient parallelization strategies. We evaluate our algorithms with microbenchmarks and image classification with ResNet-50. Our algorithms allow us to prototype a model for a mesh-tangling dataset, where sample sizes are very large. We show that our parallelization achieves excellent strong and weak scaling and enables training for previously unreachable datasets.
Nikoli Dryden, Naoya Maruyama, Tom Benson, Tim Moon, Marc Snir, Brian Van Essen
IPDPS6
2019 Channel and filter parallelism for large-scale CNN training
abstract
Accelerating large-scale CNN training is needed to keep training times reasonable as datasets grow larger and models become more complex. Existing frameworks primarily scale using data-parallelism, but this is limited by the mini-batch size, which cannot grow arbitrarily. We introduce three algorithms that partition channel or filter data to exploit parallelism beyond the sample dimension. Further, they partition the parameters of convolutional layers, replacing global all reduces with segmented allreduces---smaller, concurrent allreduces among disjoint processor sets. These algorithms enable strong scaling, reduced communication overhead, and reduced memory pressure, enabling training of very wide CNNs.
Nikoli Dryden, Naoya Maruyama, Tim Moon, Tom Benson, Marc Snir, Brian Van Essen
SC6
2019 Preparation and optimization of a diverse workload for a large-scale heterogeneous system
abstract
Productivity from day one on supercomputers that leverage new technologies requires significant preparation. An institution that procures a novel system architecture often lacks sufficient institutional knowledge and skills to prepare for it. Thus, the "Center of Excellence" (CoE) concept has emerged to prepare for systems such as Summit and Sierra, currently the top two systems in the Top 500. This paper documents CoE experiences that prepared a workload of diverse applications and math libraries for a heterogeneous system. We describe our approach to this preparation, including our management and execution strategies, and detail our experiences with and reasons for using different programming approaches. Our early science and performance results show that the project enabled significant early seismic science with up to a l4X throughput increase over Cori. In addition to our successes, we discuss our challenges and failures so others may benefit from our experience.
Ian Karlin, Yoonho Park, Bronis R. de Supinski, Bert Still, D. A. Beckingsale, Robert Blake, Tong Chen 0001, Guojing Cong, Carlos H. A. Costa, Johann Dahm, Giacomo Domeniconi, Thomas Epperly, Aaron Fisher, Sara Kokkila Schumacher, Steve H. Langer, Hai Le, Naoya Maruyama, Xinyu Que, David F. Richards, Björn Sjögreen, Jonathan Wong, Carol S. Woodward, Ulrike Meier Yang, Bob Anderson, David Appelhans, Levi Barnes, Peter D. Barnes Jr., Sorin Bastea, David Böhme, Jamie A. Bramwell, James M. Brase, José R. Brunheroto, Barry Chen, Charway R. Cooper, Tony Degroot, Robert D. Falgout, Todd Gamblin, David J. Gardner, James N. Glosli, John A. Gunnels, Max P. Katz, Tzanio V. Kolev, I-Feng W. Kuo, Matthew P. LeGendre, Pei-Hung Lin, Shelby Lockhart, Kathleen McCandless, Claudia Misale, Jaime H. Moreno, Rob Neely, Jarom Nelson, Rao Nimmakayala, Kathryn M. O'Brien, Kevin O'Brien, Ramesh Pankajakshan, Roger A. Pearce, Slaven Peles, Phil Regier, Steven C. Rennich, Martin Schulz 0001, Howard Scott, James C. Sexton, Kathleen Shoga, Shiv Sundram, Guillaume Thomas-Collignon, Brian Van Essen, Alexey Voronin, Bob Walkup, Chris Ward, Hui-Fang Wen, Daniel A. White, Christopher Young, Cyril Zeller, Edward Zywicz
SC70
2018 Effective Quantization Approaches for Recurrent Neural Networks
abstract
Deep learning, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) in particular have shown superior accuracy in a large variety of tasks including machine translation, language understanding, and movie frames generation. However, these deep learning approaches are very expensive in terms of computation. In most cases, Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) are in used for large scale implementations. Meanwhile, energy efficient RNN approaches are proposed for deploying solutions on special purpose hardware including Field Programming Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and mobile platforms. In this paper, we propose an effective quantization approach for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) techniques including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), and Convolutional Long Short Term Memory (ConvLSTM). We have implemented different quantization methods including Binary Connect {-1, 1}, Ternary Connect {-1, 0, 1}, and Quaternary Connect {-1, -0.5, 0.5, 1}. These proposed approaches are evaluated on different datasets for sentiment analysis on IMDB and video frame predictions on the moving MNIST dataset. The experimental results are compared against the full precision versions of the LSTM, GRU, and ConvLSTM. They show promising results for both sentiment analysis and video frame prediction.
Md. Zahangir Alom, Adam Moody, Naoya Maruyama, Brian Van Essen, Tarek M. Taha
IJCNN4
2018 CANDLE/Supervisor: a workflow framework for machine learning applied to cancer research
abstract
BACKGROUND: Current multi-petaflop supercomputers are powerful systems, but present challenges when faced with problems requiring large machine learning workflows. Complex algorithms running at system scale, often with different patterns that require disparate software packages and complex data flows cause difficulties in assembling and managing large experiments on these machines. RESULTS: This paper presents a workflow system that makes progress on scaling machine learning ensembles, specifically in this first release, ensembles of deep neural networks that address problems in cancer research across the atomistic, molecular and population scales. The initial release of the application framework that we call CANDLE/Supervisor addresses the problem of hyper-parameter exploration of deep neural networks. CONCLUSIONS: Initial results demonstrating CANDLE on DOE systems at ORNL, ANL and NERSC (Titan, Theta and Cori, respectively) demonstrate both scaling and multi-platform execution.
Justin M. Wozniak, Rajeev Jain, Prasanna Balaprakash, Jonathan Ozik, Nicholson T. Collier, John Bauer, Fangfang Xia, Thomas S. Brettin, Rick L. Stevens, Jamaludin Mohd-Yusof, Cristina Garcia-Cardona, Brian Van Essen, Matt Baughman
BMC Bioinform.12
2017 A spike-based long short-term memory on a neurosynaptic processor
abstract
Low-power brain-inspired hardware systems have gained significant traction in recent years. They offer high energy efficiency and massive parallelism due to the distributed and asynchronous nature of neural computation through low-energy spikes. One such platform is the IBM TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System. Recently TrueNorth compatible representation learning algorithms have emerged, achieving close to state-of-the-art performance in various datasets. An exception is its application in temporal sequence processing models such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which is still at the proof of concept level. This is partly due to the hardware constraints in connectivity and syn-aptic weight resolution, and the inherent difficulty in capturing temporal dynamics of an RNN using spiking neurons. This work presents a design flow that overcomes the aforementioned difficulties and maps a special case of recurrent networks called Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) onto a spike-based platform. The framework is built on top of various approximation techniques, weight and activation discretization, spiking neuron sub-circuits that implements the complex gating mechanisms and a store-and-release technique to enable neuron synchronization and faithful storage. While many of the techniques can be applied to map LSTM to any SNN simulator/emulator, here we demonstrate this approach on the TrueNorth chip adhering to its constraints. Two benchmark LSTM applications, parity check and Extended Reber Grammar, are evaluated and their accuracy, energy and speed tradeoffs are analyzed.
Amar Shrestha, Khadeer Ahmed, Yanzhi Wang 0001, David P. Widemann, Adam Moody, Brian Van Essen, Qinru Qiu
ICCAD6
2017 Convolutional sparse coding on neurosynaptic cognitive system
abstract
Image features can be learned and subsequently used for reconstruction and classification tasks in the fields of machine learning and computer vision. In this work, we propose image reconstruction using Convolutional Sparse Coding (CSC) on IBM's TrueNorth Neuromorphic computing system. CSC explicitly models local interactions through the convolution operations. Convolutional kernels define a dictionary and Sparse Feature Maps (SFMs) that are generated through a training process. The images are reconstructed with convolutional operations on SFMs and respective kernels. In this paper, we report on experimental results demonstrating promising sparse reconstructions on the IBM Neuromorphic TrueNorth hardware for two different benchmarks: MNIST and CIFAR-10. It is noted that this is the first ever important step towards convolutional sparse coding on neuromorphic hardware.
Md. Zahangir Alom, Brian Van Essen, Adam Moody, David P. Widemann, Tarek M. Taha
IJCNN2
2017 Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) on neuromorphic computing system
abstract
The problems of Artificial intelligence (AI) naturally maps to NP-hard optimization problems. This trend has significance to achieve human-level computation capability from machines. This computational ability can be achieved by developing evolutionary algorithms or mapping those evolutionary algorithms onto new generation computing systems: Quantum or Neuromorphic hardware. In this paper, we implemented the NP-hard optimization problem called Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem for the solution of graph problems on the IBM's Neurosynaptic TrueNorth System. We have experimented on different types of graph problems with different levels of complexities and achieved encouraging results on IBM's Neuromorphic TrueNorth chip. Moreover, there are a set of potential applications have been discussed based on this proposed QUBO solution. Along with the QUBO on quantum annealing, it is the important first step towards the solutions of QUBO on Neuromorphic computing systems.
Md. Zahangir Alom, Brian Van Essen, Adam Moody, David P. Widemann, Tarek M. Taha
IJCNN2
2017 Argo NodeOS: Toward Unified Resource Management for Exascale
abstract
Exascale systems are expected to feature hundreds of thousands of compute nodes with hundreds of hardware threads and complex memory hierarchies with a mix of on-package and persistent memory modules. In this context, the Argo project is developing a new operating system for exascale machines. Targeting production workloads using workflows or coupled codes, we improve the Linux kernel on several fronts. We extendthe memory management of Linux to be able to subdivide NUMA memory nodes, allowing better resource partitioning among processes running on the same node. We also add support for memory-mapped access tonode-local, PCIe-attached NVRAM devices and introduce a new scheduling class targeted at parallel runtimes supporting user-level load balancing. These features are unified into compute containers, a containerization approach focused on providing modern HPC applications with dynamic control over a wide range of kernel interfaces. To keep our approach compatible with industrial containerization products, we also identifycontentions points for the adoption of containers in HPC settings. Each NodeOS feature is evaluated by using a set of parallel benchmarks, miniapps, and coupled applications consisting of simulation and data analysis components, running on a modern NUMA platform. We observe out-of-the-box performance improvements easily matching, and often exceeding, those observed with expert-optimized configurations on standard OS kernels. Our lightweight approach to resource management retains the many benefits of a full OS kernel that application programmers have learned to depend on, at the same time providing a set of extensions that can be freely mixed and matched to best benefit particular application components.
Swann Perarnau, Judicael A. Zounmevo, Matthieu Dreher, Brian Van Essen, Roberto Gioiosa, Kamil Iskra, Maya B. Gokhale, Kazutomo Yoshii, Pete Beckman
IPDPS4
2016 Truenorth ecosystem for brain-inspired computing: scalable systems, software, and applications
abstract
Abstract not provided
Jun Sawada, Filipp Akopyan, Andrew S. Cassidy, Brian Taba, Michael DeBole, Pallab Datta, Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza, Arnon Amir, John V. Arthur, Alexander Andreopoulos, Rathinakumar Appuswamy, Heinz Baier, Davis Barch, David J. Berg, Carmelo di Nolfo, Steven K. Esser, Myron Flickner, Thomas A. Horvath, Bryan L. Jackson, Jeffrey A. Kusnitz, Scott Lekuch, Michael Mastro, Timothy Melano, Paul Merolla, Steven E. Millman, Tapan K. Nayak, Norm Pass, Hartmut Penner, William P. Risk, Kai Schleupen, Ben Shaw 0001, Hayley Wu, Brian Giera, Adam Moody, T. Nathan Mundhenk, Brian Van Essen, Eric X. Wang, David P. Widemann, William E. Murphy, Jamie K. Infantolino, James A. Ross, Dale R. Shires, Manuel M. Vindiola, Raju Namburu, Dharmendra S. Modha
SC36
2015 A Container-Based Approach to OS Specialization for Exascale Computing
abstract
Future exascale systems will impose several conflicting challenges on the operating system (OS) running on the compute nodes of such machines. On the one hand, the targeted extreme scale requires the kind of high resource usage efficiency that is best provided by lightweight OSes. At the same time, substantial changes in hardware are expected for exascale systems. Compute nodes are expected to host a mix of general-purpose and special-purpose processors or accelerators tailored for serial, parallel, compute-intensive, or I/O-intensive workloads. Similarly, the deeper and more complex memory hierarchy will expose multiple coherence domains and NUMA nodes in addition to incorporating nonvolatile RAM. That expected workload and hardware heterogeneity and complexity is not compatible with the simplicity that characterizes high performance lightweight kernels. In this work, we describe the Argo Exascale node OS, which is our approach to providing in a single kernel the required OS environments for the two aforementioned conflicting goals. We resort to multiple OS specializations on top of a single Linux kernel coupled with multiple containers.
Judicael A. Zounmevo, Swann Perarnau, Kamil Iskra, Kazutomo Yoshii, Roberto Gioiosa, Brian Van Essen, Maya B. Gokhale, Edgar A. León
IC2E6
2012 Accelerating a Random Forest Classifier: Multi-Core, GP-GPU, or FPGA?
abstract
Random forest classification is a well known machine learning technique that generates classifiers in the form of an ensemble ("forest") of decision trees. The classification of an input sample is determined by the majority classification by the ensemble. Traditional random forest classifiers can be highly effective, but classification using a random forest is memory bound and not typically suitable for acceleration using FPGAs or GP-GPUs due to the need to traverse large, possibly irregular decision trees. Recent work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed several variants of random forest classifiers, including the Compact Random Forest (CRF), that can generate decision trees more suitable for acceleration than traditional decision trees. Our paper compares and contrasts the effectiveness of FPGAs, GP-GPUs, and multi-core CPUs for accelerating classification using models generated by compact random forest machine learning classifiers. Taking advantage of training algorithms that can produce compact random forests composed of many, small trees rather than fewer, deep trees, we are able to regularize the forest such that the classification of any sample takes a deterministic amount of time. This optimization then allows us to execute the classifier in a pipelined or single-instruction multiple thread (SIMT) fashion. We show that FPGAs provide the highest performance solution, but require a multi-chip / multi-board system to execute even modest sized forests. GP-GPUs offer a more flexible solution with reasonably high performance that scales with forest size. Finally, multi-threading via Open MP on a shared memory system was the simplest solution and provided near linear performance that scaled with core count, but was still significantly slower than the GP-GPU and FPGA.
Brian Van Essen, Chris Macaraeg, Maya B. Gokhale, Ryan Prenger
FCCM1
2012 On the Role of NVRAM in Data-intensive Architectures: An Evaluation
abstract
Data-intensive applications are best suited to high-performance computing architectures that contain large quantities of main memory. Creating these systems with DRAM-based main memory remains costly and power-intensive. Due to improvements in density and cost, non-volatile random access memories (NVRAM) have emerged as compelling storage technologies to augment traditional DRAM. This work explores the potential of future NVRAM technologies to store program state at performance comparable to DRAM. We have developed the PerMA NVRAM simulator that allows us to explore applications with working sets ranging up to hundreds of gigabytes per node. The simulator is implemented as a Linux device driver that allows application execution at native speeds. Using the simulator we show the impact of future technology generations of I/O-bus-attached NVRAM on an unstructured-access, level-asynchronous, Breadth-First Search (BFS) graph traversal algorithm. Our simulations show that within a couple of technology generations, a system architecture with local high performance NVRAM will be able to effectively augment DRAM to support highly concurrent data-intensive applications with large memory footprints. However, improvements will be needed in the I/O stack to deliver this performance to applications. The simulator shows that future technology generations of NVRAM in conjunction with an improved I/O runtime will enable parallel data-intensive applications to offload in-memory data structures to NVRAM with minimal performance loss.
Brian Van Essen, Roger A. Pearce, Sasha Ames, Maya B. Gokhale
IPDPS1
2011 Energy-efficient specialization of functional units in a coarse-grained reconfigurable array
abstract
Functional units provide the backbone of any spatial accelerator by providing the computing resources. The desire for having rich and expensive functional units is in tension with producing a regular and energy-efficient computing fabric. This paper explores the design trade-off between complex, universal functional units and simpler, limited functional units.
Brian Van Essen, Robin Panda, Aaron Wood, Carl Ebeling, Scott Hauck
FPGA1
2010 Managing Short-Lived and Long-Lived Values in Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays
abstract
Efficient storage in spatial processors is increasingly important as such devices get larger and support more concurrent operations. Unlike sequential processors that rely heavily on centralized storage, e.g. register files and embedded memories, spatial processors require many small storage structures to efficiently manage values that are distributed throughout the processor's fabric. The goal of this work is to determine the advantages and disadvantages of different architectural structures for storing values on-chip when optimizing for energy efficiency as well as area. Examination of applications for coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) shows that most values are short-lived; they are produced and consumed quickly, but the distribution of value lifetimes has a reasonably long tail. We take advantage of this distribution to optimize register storage structures for managing short-, medium-, and long-lived values. We show that using a combination of register storage structures, each tailored for values with different lifetimes, provides a reduction in overall area-energy product to 0.69× the area-energy of the baseline architecture, without loss of performance. Finally we provide energy profiles, characteristics, and comparisons of each register structure to enable architects to guide future design choices.
Brian Van Essen, Robin Panda, Aaron Wood, Carl Ebeling, Scott Hauck
FPL1
2009 SPR: an architecture-adaptive CGRA mapping tool
abstract
In this paper we present SPR, a new architecture-adaptive mapping tool for use with Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs). It combines a VLIW style scheduler and FPGA style placement and pipelined routing algorithms with novel mechanisms for integrating and adapting the algorithms to CGRAs. We introduce a latency padding technique that provides feedback from the placer to the scheduler to meet the constraints of a fixed frequency device with configurable interconnect. Using a new dynamic clustering method during placement, we achieved a 1.3x improvement in throughput of mapped designs. Finally, we introduce an enhancement to the PathFinder algorithm for targeting architectures with a mix of dynamically multiplexed and statically configurable interconnects. The enhanced algorithm is able to successfully share statically configured interconnect in a time-multiplexed way, achieving an average channel width reduction of .5x compared to non-shared static interconnect.
Stephen Friedman, Allan Carroll, Brian Van Essen, Benjamin Ylvisaker, Carl Ebeling, Scott Hauck
FPGA3
2009 Static versus scheduled interconnect in Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays
abstract
Spatially-tiled architectures, such as coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs), are powerful architectures for accelerating applications in the digital-signal processing, embedded, and scientific computing domains. In contrast to field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), another common accelerator, they typically time-multiplex their processing elements and are word rather than bit-oriented. These differences lead us to re-examine some of the traditional architecture choices made for FPGAs as we move to these coarser-granularity architectures. In this paper we study the efficiency of time-multiplexing global interconnect as architectures scale from single-bit to multi-bit datapaths. Using the Mosaic infrastructure, we analyzed the design trade-offs involved in static vs. time-multiplexed routing for global interconnect channels, as well as the benefit of including a dedicated bit-wide control interconnect to supplement the word-wide datapath of a CGRA. We show that a time-multiplexed interconnect is beneficial in these coarse-grained systems, reducing the area-energy product to 0.32times the area-energy product of a fully static interconnect. We also show that for our benchmarks, which include single-bit control logic, providing both word and bit-wide interconnect resources further reduces the area-energy product to 0.94times that of an exclusively word-wide interconnect.
Brian Van Essen, Aaron Wood, Allan Carroll, Stephen Friedman, Robin Panda, Benjamin Ylvisaker, Carl Ebeling, Scott Hauck
FPL1
2006 A Type Architecture for Hybrid Micro-Parallel Computers
abstract
Platform FPGAs that integrate sequential processors with a spatial fabric have become prevalent. While these hybrid architectures ease the burden of integrating sequential and spatial code in a single application, programming them, and particularly their spatial fabrics remains challenging. The difficulty arises in part from the lack of an agreed upon computational model and family of programming languages. In addition, moving algorithms into hardware is an arcane art far removed from the experience of most programmers. To address this challenge, we present a new type architecture, an abstract model analogous to the von Neumann machine for sequential computers, that can serve as common ground for algorithm designers, language designers, and hardware architects. We show that many parallel architectures, including platform FPGAs, are implementations of this type architecture. Using examples from a variety of application domains, we show how algorithms can be analyzed to estimate their performance on implementations of this type architecture. This analysis is done without having to delve into the details of any architecture in particular. Finally, we describe some of the common features of languages designed for expressing micro-parallelism, highlighting connections with the type architecture
Benjamin Ylvisaker, Brian Van Essen, Carl Ebeling
FCCM2
2006 A type architecture for hybrid micro-parallel computers
abstract
Programmable spatial fabrics, such as FPGAs, can provide some of the performance and efficiency benefits of custom hardware while retaining the low cost and flexibility of reprogrammable architectures. However, these fine-grained parallel architectures still have not been as widely adopted as many believe they could be for computationally intensive applications. The problem is two-fold: First, most applications contain substantial amounts of mostly sequential code that does not execute efficiently on a spatial fabric. Second, programming spatial architectures still requires some knowledge of the arcane arts of hardware engineering.Recently, hybrid processors that integrate a sequential processor with a spatial fabric have become prevalent. While hybrid computers ease the burden of integrating sequential and spatial code in a single application, programming them, and particularly their spatial fabrics, remains challenging. Part of the difficulty lies in the lack of a commonly agreed upon computational model and family of programming languages.To address this challenge, we are developing a new type architecture--an abstract model analogous to the von Neumann machine for sequential computers--that can serve as common ground for algorithm designers, language designers, and hardware architects. We show how this model applies to several relevant architectures, and present examples of how it can effectively inform algorithm, language, and hardware design, thereby improving the programmability of hybrid processors.
Benjamin Ylvisaker, Brian Van Essen, Carl Ebeling
FPGA2