The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Auto-parallelization of programs that have not been developed with parallelism in mind is one of the holy grails in computer science. It requires understanding the source code's data flow to automatically distribute the data, parallelize the computations, and infer synchronizations where necessary. We will discuss our new LLVM-based research compiler Polly-ACC that enables automatic compilation to accelerator devices such as GPUs. Unfortunately, its applicability is limited to codes for which the iteration space and all accesses can be described as affine functions.

In the second part of the talk, we will discuss dCUDA, a way to express parallel codes in MPI-RMA, a well-known communication library, to map them automatically to GPU clusters. The dCUDA approach enables simple and portable programming across heterogeneous devices due to programmer-specified locality. Furthermore, dCUDA enables hardware-supported overlap of computation and communication and is applicable to next-generation technologies such as NVLINK. We will demonstrate encouraging initial results and show limitations of current devices in order to start a discussion.

Bio:
Torsten is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Before joining ETH, he led the performance modeling and simulation efforts of parallel petascale applications for the NSF-funded Blue Waters project at NCSA/UIUC. He is also a key member of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) Forum where he chairs the "Collective Operations and Topologies" working group. Torsten won best paper awards at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference SC10, SC13, SC14, EuroMPI'13,HPDC'15, HPDC'16, IPDPS'15, and other conferences. He published numerous peer-reviewed scientific conference and journal articles and authored chapters of the MPI-2.2 and MPI-3.0 standards. He received the Latsis prize of ETH Zurich as well as an ERC starting grant in 2015. His research interests revolve around the central topic of "Performance-centric System Design" and include scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling. Additional information about Torsten can be found on his homepage at htor.inf.ethz.ch.