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arXiv · 1201.3496

Optimizing the Performance of Streaming Numerical Kernels on the IBM Blue Gene/P PowerPC 450 Processor

Tareq M. Malas·Aron J. Ahmadia·Jed Brown·John A. Gunnels·David E. Keyes
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Abstract

Several emerging petascale architectures use energy-efficient processors with vectorized computational units and in-order thread processing. On these architectures the sustained performance of streaming numerical kernels, ubiquitous in the solution of partial differential equations, represents a challenge despite the regularity of memory access. Sophisticated optimization techniques are required to fully utilize the Central Processing Unit (CPU). We propose a new method for constructing streaming numerical kernels using a high-level assembly synthesis and optimization framework. We describe an implementation of this method in Python targeting the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer's PowerPC 450 core. This paper details the high-level design, construction, simulation, verification, and analysis of these kernels utilizing a subset of the CPU's instruction set. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by implementing several three-dimensional stencil kernels over a variety of cached memory scenarios and analyzing the mechanically scheduled variants, including a 27-point stencil achieving a 1.7x speedup over the best previously published results.

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Tareq M. Malas, Aron J. Ahmadia, Jed Brown, John A. Gunnels, David E. Keyes. 2012-01-17. Optimizing the Performance of Streaming Numerical Kernels on the IBM Blue Gene/P PowerPC 450 Processor. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094342012444795

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