Marc Pérache is an engineer and researcher in computer science, a CEA research director, a CEA Fellow and a holder of an “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” (French degree which accredits to supervise researches) in computer science. He is in charge of coordinating the adaptation of software and programming models to current and future supercomputers.
Its main research theme concerns runtime systems and parallel programming models, in particular MPI in a multithreaded context. This work targets massively parallel architectures such as the TOP 500 supercomputers.
Marc Pérache has supervised 10 theses (+ 3 in progress) and is co-author of more than 30 articles in conferences and journals.
Abstract
High-Performance Computing (HPC) is currently facing significant challenges. The hardware pressure has become increasingly difficult to manage due to the lack of parallel abstractions in applications. As a result, parallel programs must undergo drastic evolution to effectively exploit underlying hardware parallelism. Failure to do so results in inefficient code. In this pressing environment, parallel runtimes play a critical role, and their esting becomes crucial. This paper focuses on the MPI interface and leverages the MPI binding tools to develop a multi-language test-suite for MPI. By doing so and building on previous work from the Forum’s document editors, we implement a systematic testing of MPI symbols in the context of the Parallel Computing Validation System (PCVS), which is an HPC validation platform dedicated to running and managing test-suites at scale. We first describe PCVS, then outline the process of generating the MPI API test suite, and finally, run these tests at scale. All data sets, code generators, and implementations are made available in open-source to the community. We also set up a dedicated website showcasing the results, which self-updates thanks to the Spack package manager.
Abstract
MPI is the most widely used interface for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Its success lies in its embrace of libraries and ability to evolve while maintaining backward compatibility for older codes, enabling them to run on new architectures for many years. In this paper, we propose a new level of MPI compatibility: a standard Application Binary Interface (ABI). We review the history of MPI implementation ABIs, identify the constraints from the MPI standard and ISO C, and summarize recent efforts to develop a standard ABI for MPI. We provide the current proposal from the MPI Forum’s ABI working group, which has been prototyped both within MPICH and as an independent abstraction layer called Mukautuva. We also list several use cases that would benefit from the definition of an ABI while outlining the remaining constraints.
Proceedings of SBAC-PAD 2022, IEEE, 2022
abstract
Abstract
HPC systems have experienced significant growth over the past years, with modern machines having hundreds of thousands of nodes. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the de facto standard for distributed computing on these architectures. On the MPI critical path, the message-matching process is one of the most time-consuming operations. In this process, searching for a specific request in a message queue represents a significant part of the communication latency. So far, no miracle algorithm performs well in all cases. This paper explores potential matching specializations thanks to hints introduced in the latest MPI 4.0 standard. We propose a hash-table-based algorithm that performs constant time message-matching for no wildcard requests. This approach is suitable for intensive point-to-point communication phases in many applications (more than 50% of CORAL benchmarks). We demonstrate that our approach can improve the overall execution time of real HPC applications by up to 25%. Also, we analyze the limitations of our method and propose a strategy for identifying the most suitable algorithm for a given application. Indeed, we apply machine learning techniques for classifying applications depending on their message pattern characteristics.
Tools for High Performance Computing 2018 / 2019, Springer International Publishing, p. 151-168, 2021
abstract
Abstract
The backtrace is one of the most common operations done by profiling and debugging tools. It consists in determining the nesting of functions leading to the current execution state. Frameworks and standard libraries provide facilities enabling this operation, however, it generally incurs both computational and memory costs. Indeed, walking the stack up and then possibly resolving functions pointers (to function names) before storing them can lead to non-negligible costs. In this paper, we propose to explore a means of extracting optimized backtraces with an O(1) storage size by defining the notion of stack tags. We define a new data-structure that we called a hashed-trie used to encode stack traces at runtime through chained hashing. Our process called stack-tagging is implemented in a GCC plugin, enabling its use of C and C++ application. A library enabling the decoding of stack locators though both static and brute-force analysis is also presented. This work introduces a new manner of capturing execution state which greatly simplifies both extraction and storage which are important issues in parallel profiling.
Abstract
Heterogeneous supercomputers are now considered the most valuable solution to reach the Exascale. Nowadays, we can frequently observe that compute nodes are composed of more than one GPU accelerator. Programming such architectures efficiently is challenging. MPI is the defacto standard for distributed computing. CUDAaware libraries were introduced to ease GPU inter-nodes communications. However, they induce some overhead that can degrade overall performances. MPI 4.0 Specification draft introduces the MPI Sessions model which offers the ability to initialize specific resources for a specific component of the application. In this paper, we present a way to reduce the overhead induced by CUDA-aware libraries with a solution inspired by MPI Sessions. In this way, we minimize the overhead induced by GPUs in an MPI context and allow to improve CPU + GPU programs efficiency. We evaluate our approach on various micro-benchmarks and some proxy applications like Lulesh, MiniFE, Quicksilver, and Cloverleaf. We demonstrate how this approach can provide up to a 7x speedup compared to the standard MPI model.
Tools for High Performance Computing 2017, Springer International Publishing, p. 57-71, 2019
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Abstract
Several instrumentation interfaces have been developed for parallel programs to make observable actions that take place during execution and to make accessible information about the program’s behavior and performance. Following in the footsteps of the successful profiling interface for MPI (PMPI), new rich interfaces to expose internal operation of MPI (MPI-T) and OpenMP (OMPT) runtimes are now in the standards. Taking advantage of these interfaces requires tools to selectively collect events from multiples interfaces by various techniques: function interposition (PMPI), value read (MPI-T), and callbacks (OMPT). In this paper, we present the unified instrumentation pipeline proposed by the MALP infrastructure that can be used to forward a variety of fine-grained events from multiple interfaces online to multi-threaded analysis processes implemented orthogonally with plugins. In essence, our contribution complements “front-end” instrumentation mechanisms by a generic “back-end” event consumption interface that allows “consumer” callbacks to generate performance measurements in various formats for analysis and transport. With such support, online and post-mortem cases become similar from an analysis point of view, making it possible to build more unified and consistent analysis frameworks. The paper describes the approach and demonstrates its benefits with several use cases.
Euro-Par 2013: Parallel Processing Workshops - BigDataCloud, DIHC, FedICI, HeteroPar, HiBB, LSDVE, MHPC, OMHI, PADABS, PROPER, Resilience, ROME, and UCHPC 2013, Aachen, Germany, August 26-27, 2013. Revised Selected Papers, Springer, p. 168-177, 2013
Euro-Par 2008 Workshops - Parallel Processing, VHPC 2008, UNICORE 2008, HPPC 2008, SGS 2008, PROPER 2008, ROIA 2008, and DPA 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, August 25-26, 2008, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, p. 53-62, 2008