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Interconnection networks play an essential role in the architecture of high-performance computing (HPC) systems. In this article, we explore the Galaxyfly family to build flexible-scale interconnection networks. Galaxyfly is guaranteed to retain a small constant diameter while achieving a flexible tradeoff between network scale and bisection bandwidth. Galaxyfly not only supports small-scale interconnection networks with smaller diameter but also lowers the demands for high-radix routers and is able to utilize routers with moderate radix to build exascale interconnection networks. We analyze the constructible configuration of Galaxyfly and evaluate the properties of Galaxyfly. We conduct extensive simulations and analysis to evaluate the performance, cost, and power consumption of Galaxyfly on physical layout against state-of-the-art topologies. The results show that our design achieves better performance than most existing topologies under typical HPC workloads, and is cost-effective to deploy for exascale HPC systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is promising to deploy CNN inference on local end-user devices for high-accuracy and time-sensitive applications. Model parallelism has the potential to provide high throughput and low latency in distributed CNN inference. However, it is non-trivial to use model parallelism as the original CNN model is inherently tightly-coupled structure. In this article, we propose DeCNN, a more effective inference approach that uses decoupled CNN structure to optimize model parallelism for distributed inference on end-user devices. DeCNN is novel consisting of three schemes. Scheme-1 is structure-level optimization. It exploits group convolution and channel shuffle to decouple the original CNN structure for model parallelism. Scheme-2 is partition-level optimization. It is based on channel group to partition the convolutional layers, and then leverages input-based method to partition the fully connected layers, further exposing high degree of parallelism. Scheme-3 is communication-level optimization. It uses inter-sample parallelism to hide communications for better performance and robustness, especially in the weak network connections. We use ImageNet classification task to evaluate the effectiveness of DeCNN on a distributed multi-ARM platform. Notably, when using the number of devices from 1 to 4, DeCNN can accelerate the inference of large-scale ResNet-50 by 3.21×, and reduce 65.3 percent memory footprint, with 1.29 percent accuracy improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) detection is a fundamental procedure of whole genome analysis. SOAPsnp, a classic tool for detection, would take more than one week to analyze one typical human genome, which limits the efficiency of downstream analyses. In this paper, we present mSNP, an optimized version of SOAPsnp, which leverages Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors for large-scale SNP detection. Firstly, we redesigned the essential data structures of SOAPsnp, which significantly reduces memory footprint and improves computing efficiency. Then we developed a coordinated parallel framework for a higher hardware utilization of both CPU and Xeon Phi. Also, we tailored the data structures and operations to utilize the wide VPU of Xeon Phi to improve data throughput. Last but not the least, we proposeed a read-based window division strategy to improve throughput and obtain better load balance. mSNP is the first SNP detection tool empowered by Xeon Phi. We achieved a 38x single thread speedup on CPU, without any loss in precision. Moreover, mSNP successfully scaled to 4,096 nodes on Tianhe-2. Our experiments demonstrate that mSNP is efficient and scalable for large-scale human genome SNP detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional input-queued routers in network-on-chips (NoCs) only have a small number of virtual channels (VCs) and packets in a VC are organized in a fixed order. Such design is susceptible to head-of-line (HoL) blocking as only the packet at the head of a VC can be allocated by the switch allocator. Since switch allocation is the critical pipeline stage in on-chip routers, HoL blocking significantly degrades the performance of NoCs. In this paper, we propose to schedule packets in input buffers utilizing reorder buffer (RoB) techniques. We design VCs as RoBs to allow packets located not at the head of a VC to be allocated before the head packets. RoBs reduce the conflicts in switch allocation and mitigate the HoL blocking and thus improve the NoC performance. However, it is hard to reorder all the units in a VC due to circuit complexity and power overhead. We propose RoB-Router, which leverages elastic RoBs in VCs to only allow a part of a VC to act as RoB. RoB-Router automatically determines the length of RoB in a VC based on the number of buffered flits. This design minimizes the resource while achieving excellent efficiency. Furthermore, we propose two independent methods to improve the performance of RoB-Router. One is to optimize the packet order in input buffers by redesigning VC allocation strategy. The other combines RoB-Router with current most efficient switch allocator TS-Router. We perform evaluations and the results show that our design can achieve 46 and 15.7 percent performance improvement in packet latency under synthetic traffic and traces from PARSEC than TS-Router, and the cost of energy and area is moderate. Additionally, average packet latency reduction by our two improving methods under uniform traffic is 13 and 17 percent respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The processing of massive numbers of small files is a challenge in the design of distributed file systems. Currently, the combined-block-storage approach is prevalent. However, the approach employs the traditional file systems such as ExtFS and may cause inefficiency when accessing small files randomly located in the disk. This paper focuses on optimizing the performance of data servers in accessing massive numbers of small files. We present a Flat Lightweight File System (iFlatLFS) to manage small files, which is based on a simple metadata scheme and a flat storage architecture. iFlatLFS is designed to substitute the traditional file system on data servers and can be deployed underneath distributed file systems that store massive numbers of small files. iFlatLFS can greatly simplify the original data access procedure. The new metadata proposed in this paper occupies only a fraction of the metadata size based on traditional file systems. We have implemented iFlatLFS in CentOS 5.5 and integrated it into an open source Distributed File System (DFS), called Taobao FileSystem (TFS), which is developed by a top B2C service provider, Alibaba, in China and is managing over 28.6 billion small photos. We have conducted extensive experiments to verify the performance of iFlatLFS. The results show that when the file size ranges from 1 to 64 KB, iFlatLFS is faster than Ext4 by 48 and 54 percent on average for random read and write in the DFS environment, respectively. Moreover, after iFlatLFS is integrated into TFS, iFlatLFS-based TFS is faster than the existing Ext4-based TFS by 45 and 49 percent on average for random read access and hybrid access (the mix of read and write accesses), respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influence Maximization aims to find the top-$(K)$ influential individuals to maximize the influence spread within a social network, which remains an important yet challenging problem. Proven to be NP-hard, the influence maximization problem attracts tremendous studies. Though there exist basic greedy algorithms which may provide good approximation to optimal result, they mainly suffer from low computational efficiency and excessively long execution time, limiting the application to large-scale social networks. In this paper, we present IMGPU, a novel framework to accelerate the influence maximization by leveraging the parallel processing capability of graphics processing unit (GPU). We first improve the existing greedy algorithms and design a bottom-up traversal algorithm with GPU implementation, which contains inherent parallelism. To best fit the proposed influence maximization algorithm with the GPU architecture, we further develop an adaptive $(K)$-level combination method to maximize the parallelism and reorganize the influence graph to minimize the potential divergence. We carry out comprehensive experiments with both real-world and sythetic social network traces and demonstrate that with IMGPU framework, we are able to outperform the state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithm up to a factor of 60, and show potential to scale up to extraordinarily large-scale networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local monitoring is an effective mechanism for the security of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Existing schemes assume the existence of sufficient number of active nodes to carry out monitoring operations. Such an assumption, however, is often difficult for a large-scale sensor network. In this work, we focus on designing an efficient scheme integrated with good self-monitoring capability as well as providing an infrastructure for various security protocols using local monitoring. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present the formal study on optimizing network topology for edge self-monitoring in WSNs. We show that the problem is NP-complete even under the unit disk graph (UDG) model and give the upper bound on the approximation ratio in various graph models. We provide polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) algorithms for the problem in some specific graphs, for example, the monitoring-set-bounded graph. We further design two distributed polynomial algorithms with provable approximation ratio. Through comprehensive simulations, we evaluate the effectiveness of our design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]