Nan Ding 0006

dblp:68/3975-6 · DBLP profile ↗
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11ranked-venue papers
5as first author
6since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-9624-9449ORCID · verified

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

Systems, architecture and hardware · 11 · 5 first-author · 6 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Benchmark-driven Models for Energy Analysis and Attribution of GPU-Accelerated Supercomputing
abstract
As advances in energy-efficiency become the primary limiter to increases in power-constrained supercomputing and machine learning performance, it is imperative developers, architects, and practitioners understand how modern GPUs consume energy when running HPC and ML applications. Rather than opaque coarse-grained metrics, in this paper, we develop an extensible, microbenchmark-parameterized energy model capable of attributing application energy not only by functional unit (FPU, tensor core, integer ALU) and memory level (L1, L2, HBM), but can also differentiate control energy from datapath energy. We examine trends in energy per operation among four generations of GPUs and validate our results using supercomputing and ML/AI procurement workloads. Our insights and extrapolations can be used to drive the future of CMOS and memory technologies, computer architecture research, algorithmic innovation, optimizations for power-constrained and mobile environments, and data center operations.
Oscar Antepara, Zhengji Zhao, Brian Austin, Nan Ding 0006, Leonid Oliker, Nicholas J. Wright, Samuel Williams 0001
SC4
2024 A Workflow Roofline Model for End-to-End Workflow Performance Analysis
abstract
As next-generation experimental and observational instruments for scientific research are being deployed with higher resolutions and faster data capture rates, the fundamental demands of producing high-quality scientific throughput require portability and performance to meet the high productivity goals. Understanding such a workflow’s end-to-end performance on HPC systems is formidable work. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing a Workflow Roofline model, which ties a workflow’s end-to-end performance with peak node- and system-performance constraints. We analyze four workflows: LCLS, a time-sensitive workflow that is bound by system external bandwidth; BerkeleyGW, a traditional HPC workflow that is bound by node-local performance; CosmoFlow, an AI workflow that is bound by the CPU preprocessing; and GPTune, an auto tuner that is bound by the data control flow. We demonstrate the ability of our methodology to understand various aspects of performance and performance bottlenecks on workflows and systems and motivate workflow optimizations.
Nan Ding 0006, Brian Austin, Yang Liu 0179, Neil Mehta, Steven Farrell, Johannes P. Blaschke, Leonid Oliker, Hai Ah Nam, Nicholas J. Wright, Samuel Williams 0001
SC1
2024 Evaluating the potential of disaggregated memory systems for HPC applications
abstract
Summary Disaggregated memory is a promising approach that addresses the limitations of traditional memory architectures by enabling memory to be decoupled from compute nodes and shared across a data center. Cloud platforms have deployed such systems to improve overall system memory utilization, but performance can vary across workloads. High‐performance computing (HPC) is crucial in scientific and engineering applications, where HPC machines also face the issue of underutilized memory. As a result, improving system memory utilization while understanding workload performance is essential for HPC operators. Therefore, learning the potential of a disaggregated memory system before deployment is a critical step. This paper proposes a methodology for exploring the design space of a disaggregated memory system. It incorporates key metrics that affect performance on disaggregated memory systems: memory capacity, local and remote memory access ratio, injection bandwidth, and bisection bandwidth, providing an intuitive approach to guide machine configurations based on technology trends and workload characteristics. We apply our methodology to analyze thirteen diverse workloads, including AI training, data analysis, genomics, protein, fusion, atomic nuclei, and traditional HPC bookends. Our methodology demonstrates the ability to comprehend the potential and pitfalls of a disaggregated memory system and provides motivation for machine configurations. Our results show that eleven of our thirteen applications can leverage injection bandwidth disaggregated memory without affecting performance, while one pays a rack bisection bandwidth penalty and two pay the system‐wide bisection bandwidth penalty. In addition, we also show that intra‐rack memory disaggregation would meet the application's memory requirement and provide enough remote memory bandwidth.
Nan Ding 0006, Pieter Maris, Hai Ah Nam, Taylor L. Groves, Muaaz Gul Awan, LeAnn Lindsey, Christopher S. Daley, Oguz Selvitopi, Leonid Oliker, Nicholas J. Wright, Samuel Williams 0001
Concurr. Comput. Pract. Exp.1
2023 Unified Communication Optimization Strategies for Sparse Triangular Solver on CPU and GPU Clusters
abstract
This paper presents a unified communication optimization framework for sparse triangular solve (SpTRSV) algorithms on CPU and GPU clusters. The framework builds upon a 3D communication-avoiding (CA) layout of Px × Py × Pz processes that divides a sparse matrix into Pz submatrices, each handled by a Px × Py 2D grid with block-cyclic distribution. We propose three communication optimization strategies: First, a new 3D SpTRSV algorithm is developed, which trades the inter-grid communication and synchronization with replicated computation. This design requires only one inter-grid synchronization, and the inter-grid communication is efficiently implemented with sparse allreduce operations. Second, broadcast and reduction communication trees are used to reduce message latency of the intra-grid 2D communication on CPU clusters. Finally, we leverage GPU-initiated one-sided communication to implement the communication trees on GPU clusters. With these nested inter- and intra-grid communication optimization strategies, the proposed 3D SpTRSV algorithm can attain up to 3.45x speedups compared to the baseline 3D SpTRSV algorithm using up to 2048 Cori Haswell CPU cores. In addition, the proposed GPU 3D SpTRSV algorithm can achieve up to 6.5x speedups compared to the proposed CPU 3D SpTRSV algorithm with Pz up to 64. Finally it is remarkable that the proposed GPU 3D SpTRSV can scale to 256 GPUs using the Perlmutter system while the existing 2D SpTRSV algorithm can only scale up to 4 GPUs.
Yang Liu 0179, Nan Ding 0006, Piyush Sao, Samuel Williams 0001, Xiaoye S. Li
SC2
2022 Instruction Roofline: An insightful visual performance model for GPUs
abstract
Abstract The Roofline performance model provides an intuitive approach to identify performance bottlenecks and guide performance optimization. However, the classic FLOP‐centric approach is inappropriate for the emerging applications that perform more integer operations than floating point operations. In this article, we reintroduce our Instruction Roofline Model on NVIDIA GPUs and expand our evaluation of it. The Instruction Roofline incorporates instructions and memory transactions across all memory hierarchies together, and provides more performance insights than the FLOP‐oriented Roofline Model, that is, instruction throughput, stride memory access patterns, bank conflicts, and thread predication. We use our Instruction Roofline methodology to analyze eight proxy applications: HPGMG from AMReX, Matrix Transpose benchmarks, ADEPT from MetaHipMer's sequence alignment phase, EXTENSION from MetaHipMer's local assembly phase, CUSP, cuSPARSE, cudaTensorCoreGemm, and cuBLAS. We demonstrate the ability of our methodology to understand various aspects of performance and performance bottlenecks on NVIDIA GPUs and motivate code optimizations.
Nan Ding 0006, Muaaz Gul Awan, Samuel Williams 0001
Concurr. Comput. Pract. Exp.1
2021 Accelerating large scale de novo metagenome assembly using GPUs
abstract
Metagenomic workflows involve studying uncultured microorganisms directly from the environment. These environmental samples when processed by modern sequencing machines yield large and complex datasets that exceed the capabilities of metagenomic software. The increasing sizes and complexities of datasets make a strong case for exascale-capable metagenome assemblers. However, the underlying algorithmic motifs are not well suited for GPUs. This poses a challenge since the majority of next-generation supercomputers will rely primarily on GPUs for computation. In this paper we present the first of its kind GPU-accelerated implementation of the local assembly approach that is an integral part of a widely used large-scale metagenome assembler, MetaHipMer. Local assembly uses algorithms that induce random memory accesses and non-deterministic workloads, which make GPU offloading a challenging task. Our GPU implementation outperforms the CPU version by about 7x and boosts the performance of MetaHipMer by 42% when running on 64 Summit nodes.
Muaaz Gul Awan, Steven Hofmeyr, Rob Egan, Nan Ding 0006, Aydin Buluç, Jack Deslippe, Leonid Oliker, Katherine A. Yelick
SC4
2020 LOGAN: High-Performance GPU-Based X-Drop Long-Read Alignment
abstract
Pairwise sequence alignment is one of the most computationally intensive kernels in genomic data analysis, accounting for more than 90% of the runtime for key bioinformatics applications. This method is particularly expensive for third-generation sequences due to the high computational cost of analyzing sequences of length between 1Kb and 1Mb. Given the quadratic overhead of exact pairwise algorithms for long alignments, the community primarily relies on approximate algorithms that search only for high-quality alignments and stop early when one is not found. In this work, we present the first GPU optimization of the popular X-drop alignment algorithm, that we named LOGAN. Results show that our high-performance multi-GPU implementation achieves up to 181.6 GCUPS and speed-ups up to 6.6× and 30.7× using 1 and 6 NVIDIA Tesla V100, respectively, over the state-of-the-art software running on two IBM Power9 processors using 168 CPU threads, with equivalent accuracy. We also demonstrate a 2.3× LOGAN speed-up versus ksw2, a state-of-art vectorized algorithm for sequence alignment implemented in minimap2, a long-read mapping software. To highlight the impact of our work on a real-world application, we couple LOGAN with a many-to-many long-read alignment software called BELLA, and demonstrate that our implementation improves the overall BELLA runtime by up to 10.6×. Finally, we adapt the Roofline model for LOGAN and demonstrate that our implementation is near optimal on the NVIDIA Tesla V100s.
Alberto Zeni, Giulia Guidi, Marquita Ellis, Nan Ding 0006, Marco D. Santambrogio, Steven Hofmeyr, Aydin Buluç, Leonid Oliker, Katherine A. Yelick
IPDPS4
2020 APMT: an automatic hardware counter-based performance modeling tool for HPC applications
abstract
Abstract The ever-growing complexity of HPC applications and the computer architectures cost more efforts than ever to learn application behaviors. In this paper, we propose the APMT, an Automatic Performance Modeling Tool, to understand and predict performance efficiently in the regimes of interest to developers and performance analysts while outperforming many traditional techniques. In APMT, we use hardware counter-assisted profiling to identify the key kernels and non-scalable kernels and build each kernel model according to our performance modeling framework. Meantime, we also provide an optional refinement modeling framework to further understand the key performance metric, cycles-per-instruction (CPI). Our evaluations show that by only performing a few small-scale profiling, APMT is able to keep the average error rate around 15% with average performance overheads of 3% in different scenarios, including NAS parallel benchmarks, dynamical core of atmosphere model of the Community Earth System Model (CESM), and the ice component of CESM on commodity clusters. APMT improve the model prediction accuracies by 25–52% in strong scaling tests comparing to the well-known analytical model and the empirical model.
Nan Ding 0006, Victor W. Lee, Wei Xue 0003
CCF Trans. High Perform. Comput.1
2019 An automatic performance model-based scheduling tool for coupled climate system models
Nan Ding 0006, Wei Xue 0003, Zhenya Song, Haohuan Fu, Shiming Xu
J. Parallel Distributed Comput.1
2017 Redesigning CAM-SE for peta-scale climate modeling performance and ultra-high resolution on Sunway TaihuLight
abstract
The Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) is ported, redesigned, and scaled to the full system of the Sunway TaihuLight, and provides peta-scale climate modeling performance. We refactored and optimized the complete code using OpenACC directives at the first stage. A more aggressive and finer-grained redesign is then applied on the CAM, to achieve finer memory control and usage, more efficient vectorization and compute and communication overlapping. We further improve the CAM performance of a 260-core Sunway processor to the range of 28 to 184 Intel CPU cores, and achieve a sustainable double-precision performance of 3.3 PFlops for a 750 m global simulation when using 10,075,000 cores. CAM on Sunway achieves the simulation speed of 3.4 and 21.5 simulation-year-per-day (SYPD) for global 25-km and 100-km resolution respectively; and enables us to perform, to our knowledge, the first simulation of the complete lifecycle of hurricane Katrina, and achieve close-to-observation simulation results for both track and intensity.
Haohuan Fu, Junfeng Liao, Nan Ding 0006, Xiaohui Duan, Lin Gan 0001, Yishuang Liang, Jinzhe Yang, Lanning Wang, Guangwen Yang 0002
SC3
2016 Refactoring and optimizing the community atmosphere model (CAM) on the sunway taihulight supercomputer
abstract
This paper reports our efforts on refactoring and optimizing the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) on the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which uses a many-core processor that consists of management processing elements (MPEs) and clusters of computing processing elements (CPEs). To map the large code base of CAM to the millions of cores on the Sunway system, we take OpenACC-based refactoring as the major approach, and apply source-to-source translator tools to exploit the most suitable parallelism for the CPE cluster, and to fit the intermediate variable into the limited on-chip fast buffer. For individual kernels, when comparing the original ported version using only MPEs and the refactored version using both the MPE and CPE clusters, we achieve up to 22× speedup for the compute-intensive kernels. For the 25km resolution CAM global model, we manage to scale to 24,000 MPEs, and 1,536,000 CPEs, and achieve a simulation speed of 2.81 model years per day.
Haohuan Fu, Junfeng Liao, Wei Xue 0003, Lanning Wang, Dexun Chen, Long Gu, Jinxiu Xu 0001, Nan Ding 0006, Conghui He, Shizhen Xu, Yishuang Liang, Jiarui Fang, Yuanchao Xu 0001, Weijie Zheng 0001, Jingheng Xu, Zhen Zheng, Wanjing Wei, Bingwei Chen, Xiaomeng Huang, Guangwen Yang 0002
SC8