high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Transition to hybrid CPU/GPU platforms in high performance computing is challenging in the aspect of efficient utilisation of the heterogeneous hardware and existing optimised software. During recent years, scientific software has been ported to multicore and GPU architectures and now should be reused on hybrid platforms. In this paper, we model the performance of such scientific applications in order to execute them efficiently on hybrid platforms. We consider a hybrid platform as a heterogeneous distributed-memory system and apply the approach of functional performance models, which was originally designed for uniprocessor machines. The functional performance model (FPM) represents the processor speed by a function of problem size and integrates many important features characterising the performance of the architecture and the application. We demonstrate that FPMs facilitate performance evaluation of scientific applications on hybrid platforms. FPM-based data partitioning algorithms have been proved to be accurate for load balancing on heterogeneous networks of uniprocessor computers. We apply FPM-based data partitioning to balance the load between cores and GPUs in the hybrid architecture. In our experiments with parallel matrix multiplication, we couple the existing software optimised for multicores and GPUs and achieve high performance of the whole hybrid system.