Adaptive Optimization for Petascale Heterogeneous CPU/GPU Computing

In this paper, we describe our experiment developing an implementation of the Linpack benchmark for TianHe-1, a petascale CPU/GPU supercomputer system, the largest GPU-accelerated system ever attempted before. An adaptive optimization framework is presented to balance the workload distribution across the GPUs and CPUs with the negligible runtime overhead, resulting in the better performance than the static or the training partitioning methods. The CPU-GPU communication overhead is effectively hidden by a software pipelining technique, which is particularly useful for large memory-bound applications. Combined with other traditional optimizations, the Linpack we optimized using the adaptive optimization framework achieved 196.7 GFLOPS on a single compute element of TianHe-1. This result is 70.1% of the peak compute capability and 3.3 times faster than the result using the vendor’s library. On the full configuration of TianHe-1 our optimizations resulted in a Linpack performance of 0.563PFLOPS, which made TianHe-1 the 5th fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list released in November 2009.