Department of CSE CS6801 Multicore Architecture and programming

CS6801 MULTI-CORE ARCHITECTURES AND PROGRAMMING

UNIT I MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS

1. Single core to Multi-core architectures

2. SIMD systems
3. MIMD systems
4. Interconnection networks
5. Cache coherence
6. Symmetric and Distributed Shared Memory Architectures
7. Performance Issues
8. parallel program design

UNIT II PARALLEL PROGRAM CHALLENGES

1. Performance
2. Scalability
3. Data races
4. Synchronization primitives (mutexes, locks)
5. Synchronization primitives (semaphores, barriers)
6. deadlocks and livelocks
7. communication between threads (condition variables, signals)
8. communication between threads (message queues and pipes)

UNIT III SHARED MEMORY PROGRAMMING WITH OpenMP

1. OpenMP Execution andMemory Model

2. OpenMP Directives
3. Work-sharing Constructs
4. Library functions
5. Handling Data
6. Functional Parallelism
7. Handling Loops
8. Performance Considerations.

UNIT IV DISTRIBUTED MEMORY PROGRAMMING WITH MPI

1. MPI program execution

2. MPI constructs
3. libraries
4. MPI send and receive
5. Point-to-point communication
6. Collective communication
7. MPI derived datatypes
8. Performance evaluation

UNIT V PARALLEL PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT (case studies)

n-Body solvers
1. The problem
2. parallelizing n-Body solver
3. Parallelizing using OpenMP
4. Parallelizing using MPI
Tree search
5. The problem
6. parallelizing n-Body solver
7. Parallelizing using OpenMP
8. Parallelizing using MPI

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UNIT I MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS

1. SINGLE CORE TO MULTI-CORE ARCHITECTURES

What is multicore architecture?

When a processor has more than one core to execute all the necessary functions of a computer, it’s
processor is known to be a multi core architecture. In other words, a chip with more than one
CPU’s(Central Processing Unit).

Objective

◼ Why we need ever-increasing performance.

◼ Why we’re building parallel systems.
◼ Why we need to write parallel programs.
◼ How do we write parallel programs?
◼ What we’ll be doing.
◼ Concurrent, parallel, distributed!

Introduction

◼ From 1986 – 2002, microprocessors were speeding like a rocket, increasing in performance an average
of 50% per year.
◼ Since then, it’s dropped to about 20% increase per year.
◼ Its decided that Instead of designing and building faster microprocessors, put multiple processors on a
single integrated circuit.
◼ Adding more processors doesn’t help much if programmers aren’t aware of them…
… or don’t know how to use them.
Serial programs don’t benefit from this approach (in most cases).
All of this raises a number of questions:
1. Why do we care? Aren’t single processor systems fast enough? After all, 20% per year is still a
pretty significant performance improvement.
2. Why can’t microprocessor manufacturers continue to develop much faster single processor
systems? Why build parallel systems? Why build systems with multiple processors?
3. Why can’t we write programs that will automatically convert serial programs into parallel
programs, that is, programs that take advantage of the presence of multiple processors?

Why we need ever-increasing performance?

◼ Computational power is increasing, but so are our computation problems and needs.
◼ Problems we never dreamed of have been solved because of past increases, such as decoding the
human genome.
◼ More complex problems are still waiting to be solved
Climate modelling, Protein folding, Drug discovery, Energy research, Data analysis

Why we’re building parallel systems?

◼ Up to now, performance increases have been attributable to increasing density of transistors.

◼ But there are inherent problems.
• Smaller transistors = faster processors.
• Faster processors = increased power consumption.
• Increased power consumption = increased heat.
• Increased heat = unreliable processors

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◼ Rather than building ever-faster, more complex, monolithic processors, the industry has decided to put
multiple, relatively simple, complete processors on a single chip. Such integrated circuits are called
multicore processors,andcore has become synonymous with central processing unit, or CPU.

Why we need to write parallel programs?

◼ Most programs that have been written for conventional, single-core systems cannot exploit the presence
of multiple cores.
◼ The solution is
• Rewrite serial programs so that they’re parallel. (preferred)
• Write translation programs that automatically convert serial programs into parallel programs.
▪ This is very difficult to do.
▪ Success has been limited
◼ An efficient parallel implementation of a serial program may not be obtained byfinding efficient
parallelization(using translation programs) of each of its steps.
◼ Rather, the best parallelizationmay be obtained by stepping back and devising an entirely new
algorithm.
Example
Compute n values and add them together. The Serial solution is
sum = 0;
for (i = 0; i< n; i++) {
x = Compute next value(. . .);
sum += x;
}
Suppose we have p cores, p much smaller than n. Each core performs a partial sum of approximately n/p
values.

Here the prefix my_ indicates that each core is using its own, private variables, and each core can
execute this block of code independently of the other cores.
After each core completes execution of this code, its variable my sum will store the sum of the values
computed by its calls to Compute next value. For example,if there are eight cores, n D 24, and the 24 calls to
Compute next value return the values
1, 4, 3, 9, 2, 8, 5, 1, 1, 6, 2, 7, 2, 5, 0, 4, 1, 8, 6, 5, 1, 2, 3, 9,
then the values stored in my sum might be

When the cores are done computing their values of my sum, they can form a global sum by sending their
results to a designated “master” core, which can add their results:

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Core 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

my_sum 8 19 7 15 7 13 12 14

Global sum
8 + 19 + 7 + 15 + 7 + 13 + 12 + 14 = 95

Core 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

my_sum 95 19 7 15 7 13 12 14

But you can probably see a better way to do this—especially if the number of cores is large.

◼ In the first example, the master core performs 7 receives and 7 additions.
◼ In the second example, the master core performs 3 receives and 3 additions.
◼ The improvement is more than a factor of 2!
◼ The difference is more dramatic with a larger number of cores
The point here is that it’s unlikely that a translation program would “discover” the second global sum.
Thus, we cannot simply continue to write serial programs, we must write parallel programs, programs that
exploit the power of multiple processors.

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How do we write parallel programs?

◼ Task parallelism

◼ Partition various tasks carried out solving the problem among the cores.

◼ Data parallelism

◼ Partition the data used in solving the problem among the cores.

◼ Each core carries out similar operations on it’s part of the data.

As an example, suppose that Prof P has to teach a section of “Survey of English Literature.” Also
suppose that Prof P has three hundred students in her section, so she’s been assigned three teaching assistants
(TAs): TA#1 TA#2, TA#3. At the end of the semester exams, they have grade the answers to the questions.

• 15 questions
• 300 students(exams)

Division of work-Task parallelism

Division of work-Data parallelism

The first part of the global sum example would probably be considered an example of data-parallelism
The second part of the first global sum example might be considered an example of task-parallelism

Cores usually need to coordinate their work. It involves

◼ Communication – one or more cores send their current partial sums to another core.
◼ Load balancing – share the work evenly among the cores so that one is not heavily loaded.
◼ Synchronization – because each core works at its own pace, make sure cores do not get too far
ahead of the rest

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What we’ll be doing?

◼ Learning to write programs that are explicitly parallel using the C language.

◼ Using three different extensions to C.

◼ Message-Passing Interface (MPI)

◼ OpenMP

◼ Types of parallel system

◼ Shared-memory
➢ The cores can share access to the computer’s memory.
➢ Coordinate the cores by having them examine and update shared memory locations.
◼ Distributed-memory
➢ Each core has its own, private memory.
➢ The cores must communicate explicitly by sending messages across a network.
OpenMP were designed for programming shared-memory systems. They provide mechanisms for
accessing shared-memory locations. MPI, on the other hand, was designed for programming distributed-
memory systems. It provides mechanisms for sending messages.

Shared memory Distributed memory

Concurrent, parallel, distributed!

◼ Concurrent computing – a program is one in which multiple tasks can be in progress at any instant.
◼ Parallel computing – a program is one in which multiple tasks cooperate closely to solve a problem
◼ Distributed computing – a program may need to cooperate with other programs to solve a problem.

So parallel and distributed programs are concurrent

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2.SIMD System

In parallel computing, Flynn’s taxonomy [18] is frequently used to classify

computerarchitectures. It classifies a system according to the number of instruction streams andthe number of
data streams it can simultaneously manage.

SIMD system can be thoughtof as having a single control unit and multiple ALUs. An instruction is
broadcastfrom the control unit to the ALUs, and each ALU either applies the instruction to thecurrent data
item, or it is idle.
Example:
suppose we want to carry out a “vector addition.” That is, suppose we have two arrays x and y, each
with n elements, and we want to add the elements of y to the elements of x:

◼ What if we don’t have as many ALUs as data items?

◼ Divide the work and process iteratively.
Ex. m = 4 ALUs and n = 15 data items

Rounds ALU1 ALU2 ALU3 ALU4

1 X[0] X[1] X[2] X[3]

2 X[4] X[5] X[6] X[7]

3 X[8] X[9] X[10] X[11]

4 X[12] X[13] X[14]

SIMD Drawbacks
◼ All ALUs are required to execute the same instruction, or remain idle.
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For example, supposewe only want to carry out the addition if y[i] is positive:
for (i = 0; i< n; i++)
if (y[i] > 0.0) x[i] += y[i];
ALU will be idle if value is negative.
◼ In classic design, they must also operate synchronously.
◼ The ALUs have no instruction storage.so an ALU can’tdelay execution of an instruction by storing it
for later execution.
◼ Efficient for large data parallel problems, but not other types of more complex parallel problems
By the late 1990s the only widely produced SIMDsystems were vector processors. More recently, graphics
processing units, or GPUs,and desktop CPUs are making use of aspects of SIMD computing.
Vector processors
Operate on arrays or vectors of data while conventional CPU’s operate on individual data elements or
scalars.Recent systems have thefollowing characteristics:
◼ Vector registers.
Capable of storing a vector of operands and operating simultaneously on their contents.
◼ Vectorized and pipelined functional units.
The same operation is applied to each element in the vector (or pairs of elements).
◼ Vector instructions.
Operate on vectors rather than scalars.
◼ Interleaved memory.
➢ Multiple “banks” of memory, which can be accessed more or less independently.
➢ Distribute elements of a vector across multiple banks, so reduce or eliminate delay in
loading/storing successive elements.
◼ Strided memory access and hardware scatter/gather.
The program accesses elements of a vector located at fixed intervals.
Vector processors - Pros
➢Fast.
➢Easy to use.
➢Vectorizing compilers are good at identifying code to exploit.
➢Compilers also can provide information about code that cannot be vectorized.
• Helps the programmer re-evaluate code.
➢High memory bandwidth.
➢Uses every item in a cache line
Vector processors - Cons
➢ They don’t handle irregular data structures as well as other parallel architectures.
➢ A very finite limit to their ability to handle ever larger problems. (scalability)

Graphics processing units

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◼ Real time graphics application programming interfaces or API’s use points, lines, and triangles to
internally represent the surface of an object.

◼ A graphics processing pipeline converts the internal representation into an array of pixels that can be
sent to a computer screen.

◼ Several stages of this pipeline (called shader functions) are programmable.

➢ Typically, just a few lines of C code.

◼ Shader functions are also implicitly parallel, since they can be applied to multiple elements in
the graphics stream.

◼ GPU’s can often optimize performance by using SIMD parallelism.

◼ The current generation of GPU’s use SIMD parallelism.Although they are not pure SIMD systems.

3.MIMD Systems
◼ Supports multiple simultaneous instruction streams operating on multiple data streams.
◼ Typically consist of a collection of fully independent processing units or cores, each of which has its
own control unit and its own ALU
◼ MIMD systems are usually asynchronous, that is, the processors can operateat their own pace.
◼ In many MIMD systems there is no global clock, and there maybe no relation between the system
times on two different processors
There are two types of MIMD Systems
Shared Memory System
❖ A collection of autonomous processors is connected to a memory system via an interconnection
network.
❖ Each processor can access each memory location.
❖ The processors usually communicate implicitly by accessing shared data structures.
❖ Most widely available shared memory systems use one or more multicore processors

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In shared-memory systems with multiple multicore processors, there are 2 types

❖ UMA multicore system

The interconnectconnects all the processors directly to main memory

➢ Time to access allthe memory locationswill be the same forall the cores.
➢ UMA systemsare usually easier to program, since the programmer doesn’t need to worry
aboutdifferent access times for different memory locations

❖ NUMA multicore system

Each processor canhave a direct connection to a block of main memory, and the processors can
accesseach other’sblocks of main memory through special hardware built into the processors.

NUMA systems have the potential to use larger amounts of memory than UMAsystems.

UMA-Uniform Memory Access NUMA- Non-Uniform Memory Access

Distributed Memory System

The most widely available distributed-memory systems are called clusters

◼ A collection of commodity systems.

◼ Connected by a commodity interconnection network.

◼ Nodes of a cluster are individual computations units joined by a communication network.

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4. INTERCONNECTION NETWORKS
❖ Affects performance of both distributed and shared memory systems.
❖ Two categories:
➢ Shared memory interconnects
➢ Distributed memory interconnects
Shared memory interconnects
◼ Bus interconnect
◼ A collection of parallel communication wires together with some hardware that controls
access to the bus.
◼ Communication wires are shared by the devices that are connected to it.
◼ As the number of devices connected to the bus increases, contention for use of the bus
increases, and performance decreases.
◼ Switched interconnect( crossbar)
◼ Uses switches to control the routing of data among the connected devices.
◼ Crossbar –
◼ Allows simultaneous communication among different devices.
◼ Faster than buses.
◼ But the cost of the switches and links is relatively high.

(a) A crossbar switch connecting 4

processors (Pi) and 4 memory modules (Mj)

(b)Configuration of internal switches in a

crossbar

(c)Simultaneous memory accesses by the

processors

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Distributed memory interconnects

Two groups
1. Direct interconnect
Each switch is directly connected to a processor memory pair, and the switches are connected
to each other.

o The circles are switches, the squares are processors, and the lines are bidirectional links.
o A ring is superior to a simple bus since it allows multiple simultaneous communications.
o The toroidal mesh will be more expensive than the ring, because the switches are more
complex. theymust support five links instead of three
o The number of possible simultaneous communications patterns is greater with a mesh than
with a ring

Definition: Bisection width

◼ A measure of “number of simultaneous communications” or “connectivity”.

◼ How many simultaneous communications can take place “across the divide” between the
halves?

Two bisections of a ring

Network is divided 2 nodes paired

Two bisections of a ring: (a) only two communications can take place between the halves
and (b) four simultaneous connections can take place

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◼ In fig a) we’ve divided a ring with eight nodes into two groups of four nodes, and we can see that
only two communications can take place between the halves.
◼ In fig b) we’ve divided the nodes into two parts so that four simultaneous communications can
take place
◼ The bisection width is supposed to give a “worst-case” estimate, so the bisection width is two—
not four.
An alternative way of computing the bisection width is to remove the minimum number of links needed to
split the set of nodes into two equal halves. The number of links removed is the bisection width.

Two bisections of a Troidal mesh network

If we have a square two-dimensional toroidal mesh with p = q2 nodes (where q is even), then we can
split the nodes into two halves by removing the “middle” horizontal links and the “wraparound” horizontal
links

Definition: Bandwidth
◼ The rate at which a link can transmit data.
◼ Usually given in megabits or megabytes per second.
Definition : Bisection bandwidth
◼ A measure of network quality.
◼ Instead of counting the number of links joining the halves, it sums the bandwidth of the links
Definition: Fully connected network
Each switch is directly connected to every other switch.

Here, the bisection width = p2/4

it’s impractical to construct such an interconnect for systems with more than a few nodes

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Definition: Hypercube

◼ Highly connected direct interconnect.

◼ Built inductively:
• A one-dimensional hypercube is a fully-connected system with two processors.
• A two-dimensional hypercube is built from two one-dimensional hypercubes by joining
“corresponding” switches.
• Similarly a three-dimensional hypercube is built from two two-dimensional hypercubes

(a) One-, (b) two-, and (c) three-dimensional hypercubes

2. Indirect interconnect
◼ Switches may not be directly connected to a processor.
◼ They’re often shown with unidirectional links and a collection of processors, each of
which has an outgoing and an incoming link, and a switching network.
Generic indirect network

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Simple examples of indirect networks:

◼ Crossbar

As long as two processors don’t attempt to communicate with the same processor, all the processors
can simultaneously communicate with another processor.

◼ Omega network

• The switches are two-by-two crossbars.

• Unlike the crossbar, there are communications that cannot occur simultaneously.
• For example, if processor 0 sends a message to processor 6, then processor 1 cannot
simultaneously send a message to processor 7.
• On the other hand, the omega network is less expensive than the crossbar.

A switch in an omega network

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◼ Definition: Latency
◼ The time that elapses between the source’s beginning to transmit the data and the destination’s
starting to receive the first byte.
◼ Definition: Bandwidth
◼ The rate at which the destination receives data after it has started to receive the first byte.

5. CACHE COHERENCE
Cache coherence is the discipline that ensures that changes in the values of shared operands are
propagated throughout the system in a timely fashion.
Example
Assume that we have a shared memory system with two cores, each of which has its own private
data cache.. As long as the two cores only read shared data, there is no problem. For example, suppose that x
is a shared variable that has been initialized to 2, y0 is private and owned by core 0, and y1 and z1 are private
and owned by core 1 as below. Now suppose the following statements are executed at the indicated times:

Then the memory location for y0 will eventually get the value 2, and the memory location for y1 will
eventually get the value 6. However, it’s not so clear what value z1 will get. It might at first appear that since
core 0 updates x to 7 before the assignment to z1, z1 will get the value 4 × 7 = 28. However, at time 0, x is in
the cache of core 1. So unless for some reason x is evicted from core 0’s cache and then reloaded into core
1’s cache, it actually appears that the original value x = 2 may be used, and z1 will get the value 4 × 2 = 8.

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A shared-memory system with two cores and two caches

Note that this unpredictable behavior will occur regardless of whether the system is using a write-
through or a write-back policy. If it’s using a write-through policy, the main memory will be updated by the
assignment x = 7. However, this will have no effect on the value in the cache of core 1. If the system is using
a write-back policy, the new value of x in the cache of core 0 probably won’t even be available to core 1
when it updates z1. The programmer doesn’t have direct control over when the caches are updated,

Definition of Cache Coherence Problem

When the caches of multiple processors store the same variable, an update by one processor to the
cached variable is “seen” by the other processors. That is, that the cached value stored by the other
processors is also updated. This is called the cache coherence problem.

Solutions :

i) Snooping cache coherence

ii) Directory-based cache coherence

Snooping cache coherence

The idea behind snooping comes from bus-based systems: When the cores share a bus, any signal
transmitted on the bus can be “seen” by all the cores connected to the bus. Thus, when core 0 updates the
copy of x stored in its cache, if it also broadcasts this information across the bus, and if core 1 is “snooping”
the bus, it will see that x has been updated and it can mark its copy of x as invalid.

The broadcasts only informs the other cores that the "cache line containing x has been updated", not
that "x has been updated".

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it’s not essential that the interconnect be a bus, only that it support broadcasts from each processor
to all the other processors.

Snooping works with both write-through and writeback caches. . In principle, if the interconnect is
shared—as with a bus—with writethrough caches there’s no need for additional traffic on the interconnect,
since each core can simply “watch” for writes. With write-back caches, on the other hand, an extra
communication is necessary, since updates to the cache don’t get immediately sent to memory.

Directory-based cache coherence

Problem with Snooping cache

Unfortunately, in large networks broadcasts are expensive, and snooping cache coherence requires a
broadcast every time a variable is updated. So snooping cache coherence isn’t scalable.

Example

Suppose we have a system with the basic distributed-memory architecture . However, the system
provides a single address space for all the memories. So, for example, core 0 can access the variable x stored
in core 1’s memory, by simply executing a statement such as y = x. Such a system can, in principle, scale to
very large numbers of cores. However, snooping cache coherence is clearly a problem since a broadcast
across the interconnect will be very slow relative to the speed of accessing local memory.

Directory-based cache coherence protocols attempt to solve this problem through the use of a data
structure called a directory. The directory stores the status of each cache line. Typically, this data structure is
distributed.

Example:

Each core/memory pair might be responsible for storing the part of the structure that specifies the
status of the cache lines in its local memory. Thus, when a line is read into, say, core 0’s cache, the directory
entry corresponding to that line would be updated indicating that core 0 has a copy of the line. When a
variable is updated, the directory is consulted, and the cache controllers of the cores that have that variable’s
cache line in their caches are invalidated.

The problem with this method is that additional storage required for the directory, but when a cache
variable is updated,

False sharing

Definition

In shared memory systems, each processor has a local cache. The memory system must guarantee cache
coherence. False sharing occurs when threads on different processors modify variables that reside on the
same cache line. This invalidates the cache line and forces an update, which hurts performance.

The Problem

It’s important to remember that CPU caches are implemented in hardware, so they operate on cache
lines, not individual variables. This can have disastrous consequences for performance.

Example:

suppose we want to repeatedly call a function f(i,j) and add the computed values into a vector:

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We can parallelize this by dividing the iterations in the outer loop among the cores. If we have core count
cores, we might assign the first m/core count iterations to the first core, the next m/core count iterations to
the second core, and so on.

Suppose our shared-memory system has two cores, m = 8, doubles are eight bytes, cache lines are
64 bytes, and y[0] is stored at the beginning of a cache line. A cache line can store eight doubles,
and y takes one full cache line. What happens when core 0 and core 1 simultaneously execute their
codes? Since all of y is stored in a single cache line, each time one of the cores executes the
statement y[i] += f(i,j), the line will be invalidated, and the next time the other core tries to execute
this statement it will have to fetch the updated line from memory! So if n is large, we would expect
that a large percentage of the assignments y[i] += f(i,j) will access main memory—in spite of the fact
that core 0 and core 1 never access each others’ elements of y. This is called false sharing, because
the system is behaving as if the elements of y were being shared by the cores.

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False sharing does not cause incorrect results. However, it can ruin the performance of a program by
causing many more accesses to memory than necessary. We can reduce its effect by using temporary storage
that is local to the thread or process and then copying the temporary storage to the shared storage.

PERFORMANCE

The performance of parallel programs is assessed using the following aspects.

Speedup and efficiency

Amdahl’s law

Scalability

Taking timings

Speedup and efficiency

Usually the bests way to solve a problem is equally divide the work among the cores, while at the
same time introducing no additional work for the cores. If we succeed in doing this, and we run our program
with p cores, one thread or process on each core, then our parallel program will run p times faster than the
serial program.

Linear speedup

Let the serial run-time is Tserial and parallel run-time is Tparallel. If Tparallel = Tserial/p. We say that the
parallel program has linear speedup.

In practice, It is difficult to get linear speedup because the use of multiple processes/threads almost
invariably introduces some overhead. For example, sharedmemory programs will almost always have critical
sections, which will require that we use some mutual exclusion mechanism such as a mutex. The calls to the
mutex functions are overhead that’s not present in the serial program, and the use of the mutex forces the
parallel program to serialize execution of the critical section.

Distributed-memory programs will almost always need to transmit data across the network, which is
usually much slower than local memory access. Serial programs, on the other hand, won’t have these
overheads.

it’s likely that the overheads will increase as we increase the number of processes or threads.

Speedup

Definition : The speedup of a parallel program is defined as below

Speed Up ( S) = Tserial / Tparallel

then linear speedup has S = p, which is unusual. Furthermore, as p increases, we expect S to become a
smaller and smaller fraction of the ideal, linear speedup p. The following table shows an example of the
changes in S and S/p as p increases.1

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Table: Speedups and Efficiency of the parallel program

Efficiency

This value, S/p, is sometimes called the efficiency of the parallel program. If we substitute the formula for S,
we see that the efficiency is

It’s clear that Tparallel, S, and E depend on p, the number of processes or threads. We also need to keep in
mind that Tparallel, S, E, and Tserial all depend on the problem size. For example, if we halve and double the
problem size of the program whose speedups are shown in Table.

The following table shows the speedups and efficiencies.

The speedups are plotted in Figure a, and the efficiencies are plotted in Figure b

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Figure a : Speedups of parallel program on different problem sizes

Figure b : Efficiencies of parallel program on different problem sizes

when we increase the problem size, the speedups and the efficiencies increase, while they decrease when
we decrease the problem size. This behavior is quite common.

Many parallel programs are developed by dividing the work of the serial program among the
processes/threads and adding in the necessary “parallel overhead” such as mutual exclusion or
communication. Therefore, if Toverhead denotes this parallel overhead, it’s often the case that Tparallel =
Tserial/p + Toverhead. Furthermore, as the problem size is increased, Toverhead often grows more slowly
than Tserial. When this is the case the speedup and the efficiency will increase

A final issue to consider is what values of Tserial should be used when reporting speedups and
efficiencies. Some authors say that Tserial should be the run-time of the fastest program on the fastest
processor available. In practice, most authors use a serial program on which the parallel program was based
and run it on a single processor of the parallel system.

Amdahl’s law

Definition

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Unless virtually all of a serial program is parallelized, the possible speedup is going to be very
limited—regardless of the number of cores available. if a fraction r of our serial program remains
unparallelized, then Amdahl’s law says we can’t get a speedup better than 1/r.

Example

we’re able to parallelize 90% of a serial program. Further suppose that the parallelization is
“perfect,” that is, regardless of the number of cores p we use, the speedup of this part of the program will be
p.

If the serial run-time is Tserial= 20 seconds, then

the run-time of the parallelized part will be 0.9 × Tserial/p = 18/p and

the run-time of the “unparallelized” part will be 0.1 × Tserial = 2.

The overall parallel run-time will be Tparallel = 0.9 × Tserial/p + 0.1 × Tserial = 18/p + 2

and the speedup will be S = Tserial /(( 0.9 × Tserial/p) +( 0.1 × Tserial)) = 20 / ((18/p) + 2 ).

Now as p gets larger and larger, 0.9 × Tserial/p = 18/p gets closer and closer to 0, so the total parallel run-
time can’t be smaller than 0.1 × Tserial = 2. That is, the denominator in S can’t be smaller than 0.1 × Tserial =
2. The fraction S must therefore be smaller than

S ≤ Tserial /( 0.1 × Tserial) = 20/ 2 = 10

That is, S ≤ 10. This is saying that even though we’ve done a perfect job in parallelizing 90% of the program,
and even if we have, say, 1000 cores, we’ll never get a speedup better than 10.

if a fraction r of our serial program remains unparallelized, then Amdahl’s law says we can’t get a speedup
better than 1/r. In our example, r = 1 − 0.9 = 1/10, so we couldn’t get a speedup better than 10. Therefore, if
a fraction r of our serial program is “inherently serial,” that is, cannot possibly be parallelized, then we can’t
possibly get a speedup better than 1/r.

Limitations

i) Amdahl’s law doesn’t take into consideration the problem size.

Gustafson’s law : For many problems, as we increase the problem size, the “inherently serial”
fraction of the program decreases in size,

ii) There are thousands of programs used by scientists and engineers that routinely obtain huge
speedups on large distributed-memory systems

iii) In many cases, obtaining a speedup of 5 or 10 is more than adequate, especially if the effort
involved in developing the parallel program wasn’t very large.

Scalability

Definition

Suppose we run a parallel program with a fixed number of processes/threads and a fixed input size, and we
obtain an efficiency E. Suppose we now increase the number of processes/threads that are used by the

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program. If we can find a corresponding rate of increase in the problem size so that the program always has
efficiency E, then the program is scalable

Example

suppose that Tserial = n, where the units of Tserial are in microseconds, and n is also the problem size. Also
suppose that Tparallel = n/p + 1. Then

E = n / ( p(n/p + 1) )= n / n + p .

To see if the program is scalable, we increase the number of processes/threads by a factor of k, and we want
to find the factor x that we need to increase the problem size by so that E is unchanged. The number of
processes/threads will be kp and the problem size will be xn, and we want to solve the following equation for
x:

E = n/ n + p = xn/ ( xn + kp) .

If x = k, there will be a common factor of k in the denominator xn + kp = kn + kp = k(n + p), and we can reduce
the fraction to get xn / (xn + kp) = kn/ k(n + p) = n /n + p

In other words, if we increase the problem size at the same rate that we increase the number of
processes/threads, then the efficiency will be unchanged, and our program is scalable.

Types

Strongly scalable : If when we increase the number of processes/threads, we can keep the efficiency fixed
without increasing the problem size, the program is said to be strongly scalable.

Weakly scalable: If we can keep the efficiency fixed by increasing the problem size at the same rate as we
increase the number of processes/threads, then the program is said to be weakly scalable.

Taking timings

Let us see how we find Tserial and Tparallel.

Reasons for taking timings

i) During program development we may take timings in order to determine if the program is
behaving as we intend. For example, in a distributed-memory program we might be interested in finding out
how much time the processes are spending waiting for messages, because if this value is large, there is
almost certainly something wrong either with our design or our implementation.

ii) Second, we’re usually not interested in the time that elapses between the program’s start
and the program’s finish. We’re usually interested only in some part of the program. For example, if we write
a program that implements bubble sort, we’re probably only interested in the time it takes to sort the keys,
not the time it takes to read them in and print them out. We probably can’t use something like the Unix shell
command time, which reports the time taken to run a program from start to finish.

iii) Third, we’re usually not interested in “CPU time.” This is the time reported by the standard C
function clock. It’s the total time the program spends in code executed as part of the program.

For example, in a distributed-memory program, a process that calls a receive function may have to
wait for the sending process to execute the matching send, and the operating system might put the receiving
process to sleep while it waits. This idle time wouldn’t be counted as CPU time, since no function that’s been
called by the process is active. However, it should count in our evaluation of the overall run-time, since it
may be a real cost in our program. If each time the program is run, the process has to wait, ignoring the time
it spends waiting would give a misleading picture of the actual run-time of the program.

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Let us consider a code reporting the run-time of a parallel program, the reported time is usually “wall clock”
time. That is, the authors of the article report the time that has elapsed between the start and finish of
execution of the code that the user is interested in. If the user could see the execution of the program.

PARALLEL PROGRAM DESIGN

Need for parallel program design:

We need to divide the work among the processes/threads so that each process gets roughly the same amount
of work and communication is minimized.

Parallel program design steps(Foster’s methodology)

1. Partitioning. Divide the computation to be performed and the data operated on by the computation into
small tasks. The focus here should be on identifying tasks that can be executed in parallel.
2. Communication. Determine what communication needs to be carried out among the tasks identified in the
previous step.
3. Agglomeration or aggregation. Combine tasks and communications identified in the first step into larger
tasks. For example, if task A must be executed before task B can be executed, it may make sense to aggregate
them into a single composite task.
4. Mapping. Assign the composite tasks identified in the previous step to processes/ threads. This should be
done so that communication is minimized, and each process/thread gets roughly the same amount of work.

Example:
Suppose we have a program that generates large quantities of floating point data that it stores in an array. In
order to get some feel for the distribution of the data, we can make a histogram of the data. Recall that to make
a histogram, we simply divide the range of the data up into equal sized subintervals, or bins, determine the
number of measurements in each bin, and plot a bar graph showing the relative sizes of the bins. As a very
small example, suppose our data are
1.3, 2.9, 0.4, 0.3, 1.3, 4.4, 1.7, 0.4, 3.2, 0.3, 4.9, 2.4, 3.1, 4.4, 3.9, 0.4, 4.2, 4.5, 4.9, 0.9.
Then the data lie in the range 0–5, and if we choose to have five bins, the histogram might look something like

Serial program
It’s pretty straightforward to write a serial program that generates a histogram.
Input for the program
1. The number of measurements, data count;
2. An array of data count floats, data;
3. The minimum value for the bin containing the smallest values, min meas;
4. The maximum value for the bin containing the largest values, max meas;
5. The number of bins, bin count;
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output of the program

The output will be an array containing the number of elements of data that lie in each
bin. To make things precise, we’ll make use of the following data structures:
􀀀 bin_maxes. An array of bin count floats
􀀀 bin_counts. An array of bin count ints
The array bin maxes will store the upper bound for each bin, and bin counts will store the number of data
elements in each bin. To be explicit, we can define
Bin_width = (max_meas - min_meas)/bin_count
Then bin maxes will be initialized by
for (b = 0; b < bin_count; b++)
bin_maxes[b] = min_meas + bin_width_(b+1);
We’ll adopt the convention that bin b will be all the measurements in the range
Bin_maxes[b􀀀1] <= measurement < bin_maxes[b]
Of course, this doesn’t make sense if b D 0, and in this case we’ll use the rule that bin 0 will be the
measurements in the range
Min_meas <= measurement < bin_maxes[0]
This means we always need to treat bin 0 as a special case, but this isn’t too onerous. Once we’ve initialized
bin maxes and assigned 0 to all the elements of bin counts, we can get the counts by using the following
pseudo-code:
for (i = 0; i < data_count; i++) {
bin = Find_bin(data[i], bin_maxes, bin_count, min_meas);
bin counts[bin]++;
}
The Find bin function returns the bin that data[i] belongs to. This could be a simple linear search function:
search through bin maxes until you find a bin b that satisfies
Bin_maxes[b􀀀1] <= data[i] < bin_maxes[b]

Parallelizing the serial program

For the first step we might identify two types of tasks: finding the bin to which an element of data
belongs and incrementing the appropriate entry in bin_counts.
For the second step, there must be a communication between the computation of the appropriate bin
and incrementing an element of bin_counts.

Alternate definition of task and communication

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Adding the local arrays

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