Pierre Fortin

Eve Le Guillou, Michael Will, Pierre Guillou et al.

This system paper documents the technical foundations for the extension of the Topology ToolKit (TTK) to distributed-memory parallelism with the Message Passing Interface (MPI). While several recent papers introduced topology-based approaches for distributed-memory environments, these were reporting experiments obtained with tailored, mono-algorithm implementations. In contrast, we describe in this paper a versatile approach (supporting both triangulated domains and regular grids) for the support of topological analysis pipelines, i.e. a sequence of topological algorithms interacting together. While developing this extension, we faced several algorithmic and software engineering challenges, which we document in this paper. We describe an MPI extension of TTK's data structure for triangulation representation and traversal, a central component to the global performance and generality of TTK's topological implementations. We also introduce an intermediate interface between TTK and MPI, both at the global pipeline level, and at the fine-grain algorithmic level. We provide a taxonomy for the distributed-memory topological algorithms supported by TTK, depending on their communication needs and provide examples of hybrid MPI+thread parallelizations. Performance analyses show that parallel efficiencies range from 20% to 80% (depending on the algorithms), and that the MPI-specific preconditioning introduced by our framework induces a negligible computation time overhead. We illustrate the new distributed-memory capabilities of TTK with an example of advanced analysis pipeline, combining multiple algorithms, run on the largest publicly available dataset we have found (120 billion vertices) on a cluster with 64 nodes (for a total of 1536 cores). Finally, we provide a roadmap for the completion of TTK's MPI extension, along with generic recommendations for each algorithm communication category.

Pierre Fortin, Mourad Gouicem, Stef Graillat

The IEEE 754-2008 standard recommends the correct rounding of some elementary functions. This requires to solve the Table Maker's Dilemma which implies a huge amount of CPU computation time. We consider in this paper accelerating such computations, namely Lefe'vre algorithm on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) which are massively parallel architectures with a partial SIMD execution (Single Instruction Multiple Data). We first propose an analysis of the Lefèvre hard-to-round argument search using the concept of continued fractions. We then propose a new parallel search algorithm much more efficient on GPU thanks to its more regular control flow. We also present an efficient hybrid CPU-GPU deployment of the generation of the polynomial approximations required in Lefèvre algorithm. In the end, we manage to obtain overall speedups up to 53.4x on one GPU over a sequential CPU execution, and up to 7.1x over a multi-core CPU, which enable a much faster solving of the Table Maker's Dilemma for the double precision format.