Georg Hager's Blog

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PMBS19 Workshop Best Late-Breaking Paper Award

The authors proudly presenting the award at the Bavarian Supercomputing Alliance booth at SC19.

Our paper “Automatic Throughput and Critical Path Analysis of x86 and ARM Assembly Kernels” has just won the “Best Late-Breaking Paper Award” at the 10th Workshop on Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computer Systems (PMBS19), a renowned workshop co-located with the SC19 conference. The lead author, our master student Jan Laukemann, presented his work on a new version of the OSACA tool (Open-Source Architecture Code Analyzer), which now supports throughput, critical path, and loop-carried dependency analysis for assembly loop kernels on x86 and ARM architectures. It is thus a critical component for ECM and Roofline modeling and can be used as a more capable substitute for Intel’s discontinued IACA tool.

SC19 incoming!

This year at SC19 in Denver, CO, members of our group will be part of numerous contributions:

  • Our master student Jan Laukemann will present the paper “Automatic Throughput and Critical Path Analysis of x86 and ARM Assembly Kernels” at the PMBS 2019 workshop. It describes recent improvements to our “Open Source Architecture Code Analyzer” (OSACA), notably support for ARM architectures and critical path detection. This paper has received the Best Short Paper Award at the workshop.
  • Our accepted research poster “INSPECT Intranode Stencil Performance Evaluation Collection” by Julian Hammer et al. will showcase INSPECT, our open and extensible collection of performance data and models for stencil codes.
  • Our accepted research poster “LIKWID 5: Lightweight Performance Tools” by Thomas Gruber et al. will showcase the latest developments in our LIKWID performance tool suite.
  • The popular full-day tutorial “Node-Level Performance Engineering” will be presented again by Gerhard Wellein and myself.

And finally, we are again part of the activities at the LRZ booth (#2063), where “Bits, Bytes, Brezn & Beer – Supercomputing in Bavaria” is on the agenda. Drop by during the opening gala to chat and get your share of Bavarian (and Franconian) ambience.

Christie Alappat comes second place in ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals

Our PhD student Christie Louis Alappat, by winning the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at SC18 at the graduate level last year, has advanced to the ACM SRC Grand Finals, where the winners from 26 ACM conferences contend for the Grand Prize. For this last round he had to prepare a five-page paper about his research. This paper, and the whole body of his work, was evaluated again by a panel of judges.

We are now happy to announce that Christie has come second place in the Grand SRC Finale. Together with his advisor, Prof. Gerhard Wellein, he is invited to the awards ceremony which will take place in San Francisco on June 15. This is the very same ceremony at which Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun will receive the prestigious ACM Turing Award 2018 for their seminal work on deep learning algorithms. Talk about good company!

Christie’s research revolves around a long-standing problem in computer science: How must a graph be colored to enable parallel processing in the presence of dependencies? His solution, the “Recursive Algebraic Coloring Engine,” can be used to parallelize many sparse algorithms in a hardware-efficient way, taking the specific properties of modern multicore chips into account. It outperforms existing approaches and libraries by a significant margin at such an important operation as symmetric sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SymmSpMV), but its range of applicability is much broader. Christie has prepared a walk-through of his SC18 poster to explain the details:

 

 

SC18 incoming!

This year at SC18 in Dallas, TX, members of our group will be part of numerous contributions:

And finally, we are part of the activities at the LRZ booth (#1841), where “Bits, Bytes, Brezel & Bier – Supercomputing in Bavaria” is on the agenda. Drop by during the opening gala to chat and get your share of Bavarian (and Franconian) ambience.

Node-Level Performance Engineering tutorial to be featured again at SC17

Our popular “Node-Level Performance Engineering” full-day tutorial has been accepted again (now the sixth time in a row!) for presentation at SC17, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. We teach the basics of node-level computer architecture, analytic performance modeling (via the Roofline model), and model-guided optimization. Watch this cool video to whet your appetite:

When: November 12, 2017, 8:30am-5:00pm

Where: Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO.

 

Preview for SC15 tutorial on “Node-Level Performance Engineering” now available

SC15 solicits video previews of accepted tutorials for the first time this year. So watch the commercial for our SC15 full-day tutorial “Node-Level Performance Engineering“!

Kudos to Jörn Rüggeberg from the RRZE multimedia center for putting together this great piece of art.

Team members for “Gaussian Elimination Squad” now official

In case you haven’t heard it yet: The “Gaussian Elimination Squad” will defend their title in the “Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge” at SC14 in New Orleans. We have finally put together the team! Here it is:

  • Christian Terboven (University of Aachen IT Center)
  • Michael Ott (Leibniz Supercomputing Center)
  • Guido Juckeland (Technical University of Dresden)
  • Michael Kluge (Technical University of Dresden)
  • Christian Iwainsky (Technical University of Darmstadt)
  • Jan Treibig (Erlangen Regional Computing Center)
  • Georg Hager (Erlangen Regional Computing Center)

The teams all get their share of attention now at Intel’s website. AFAIK they are still looking for submissions, so take your chance to get thrashed! Figuratively speaking, of course.

Gaussian Elimination Squad to fight in “SC13 Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge”

It seems that Intel’s marketing division has some money to spend for charity – $25,000 to be exact. To make its spending as entertaining as possible, they have set up a stage show at SC13 in Denver, Colorado (Nov 17-22, 2013): The “Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge.”

Eight teams from the US, Europe, China, and Korea are going to fight in a three-round sudden death tournament. The German team comprises members from Aachen, Darmstadt, Jülich, Dresden, Garching, and Erlangen, and happens to be led by me. According to the rules each match will be 30 minutes, in which the teams have to answer questions and optimize code. The audience will have the chance to answer questions and win prizes, too! So if you happen to be at SC13 and can spare the time, drop by the Intel booth (#2701, see floor plan) and see us fight! See the link above for the schedule.

Honoring one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, the German team has chosen a peculiar war name: The “Gaussian Elimination Squad.” We will take on “Team Milky Way” from China in our first match on Tuesday, Nov 19th, 11:00am. We do not know why they have picked the name of a popular chocolate bar 😉 but probably it was in anticipation of what’s going to happen to them:

Milky Way before processing

Milky Way before elimination

Milky Way after processing

Milky Way after elimination

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now you know why we call ourselves the “Gaussian Elimination Squad.”