Title
On improving performance and energy profiles of sparse scientific applications
Abstract
In many scientific applications, the majority of the execution time is spent within a few basic sparse kernels such as sparse matrix vector multiplication (SMV). Such sparse kernels can utilize only a fraction of the available processing speed because of their relatively large number of data accesses per floating point operation, and limited data locality and data re-use. Algorithmic changes and tuning of codes through blocking and loop unrolling schemes can improve performance but such tuned versions are typically not available in benchmark suites such as the SPEC CFP 2000. In this paper, we consider sparse SMV kernels with different levels of tuning that are representative of this application space. We emulate certain memory subsystem optimizations using SimpleScalar and Wattch to evaluate improvements in performance and energy metrics. We also characterize how such an evaluation can be affected by the interplay between code tuning and memory subsystem optimizations. Our results indicate that the optimizations reduce execution time by over 40%, and the energy by over 85%, when used with power control modes of CPUs and caches. Furthermore, the relative impact of the same set of memory subsystem optimizations can vary significantly depending on the level of code tuning. Consequently, it may be appropriate to augment traditional benchmarks by tuned kernels typical of high performance sparse scientific codes to enable comprehensive evaluations of future systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1109/IPDPS.2006.1639589
IPDPS
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
sparse kernel,high performance sparse,memory subsystem optimizations,code tuning,execution time,sparse scientific application,certain memory subsystem,sparse smv kernel,data access,sparse matrix vector multiplication,energy profile,basic sparse,benchmark testing,cpu,kernel,floating point,power control,computer architecture,scientific computing,computer science,computational modeling,application software,sparse matrices,vectors,sparse matrix
Conference
1-4244-0054-6
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
10
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Konrad Malkowski1445.86
Ingyu Lee2528.90
Padma Raghavan346077.54
Mary Jane Irwin45185605.00