Berkeley Lab - Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Time:

11:00am-12:00pm

Location:

Building 50F, 1647 Conference Room

Seminar Speaker:

Rong Ge
Scalable Performance Lab
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Title:

Theories and Techniques for Efficient High-End Computing

Abstract:

As large-scale computing systems grow tremendously in size and capacity, improving power and performance efficiency becomes a compelling issue. Today it is common for a supercomputer to consume several megawatts of electric power but deliver only 10-15% of its peak performance for average applications. Such power consumption not only costs millions of dollars annually but also dissipates enormous heat that reduces system reliability and productivity. To address these issues, I have developed theories to model the performance and power in high-end computing systems as well as techniques to optimize power and performance efficiency. In this talk, I will present these theories and techniques, yet focus on the quantitative communication performance models (lognP and log3P) and their usage in improving high-end computing efficiency. Compared to previous models, these models explicitly quantify the cost of memory accesses and middleware communications in distributed systems, and thus provide more accurate performance prediction. Moreover, these models aid algorithm designs that improve performance and efficiency. Results show algorithms designed using the lognP and log3P models can outperform those designed by previous models and reduces execution time by up to 59%.

Sponsor of Seminar:

David Skinner

Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov