# GPU-Accelerated R in the Cloud with Teraproc Cluster-as-a-Service

Analysis of statistical algorithms can generate workloads that run for hours, if not days, tying up a single computer. Many statisticians and data scientists write complex simulations and statistical analysis using the R statistical computing environment. Often these programs have a very long run time. Given the amount of time R programmers can spend waiting for results, it makes sense to take advantage of parallelism in the computation and the available hardware.

In a previous post on the Teraproc blog, I discussed the value of parallelism for long-running R models, and showed how multi-core and multi-node parallelism can reduce run times. In this blog I’ll examine another way to leverage parallelism in R, harnessing the processing cores in a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPU) to dramatically accelerate commonly used clustering algorithms in R. The most widely used GPUs for GPU computing are the NVIDIA Tesla series. A Tesla K40 GPU has 2,880 integrated cores, 12 GB of memory with 288 GB/sec of bandwidth delivering up to 5 trillion floating point calculations per second.

The examples in this post build on the excellent work of Mr. Chi Yau available at r-tutor.com. Chi is the author of the CRAN open-source `rpud` package as well as `rpudplus`, R libraries that make is easy for developers to harness the power of GPUs without programming directly in CUDA C++. To learn more about R and parallel programming with GPUs you can download Chi’s e-book. For illustration purposes, I’ll focus on an example involving distance calculations and hierarchical clustering, but you can use the rpud package to accelerate a variety of applications.

## Hierarchical Clustering in R

Cluster analysis, or clustering, is the process of grouping objects such that objects in the same cluster are more similar (by a given metric) to each other than to objects in other clusters. Cluster analysis is a problem with significant parallelism. In a post on the Teraproc blog we showed an example that involved clustering analysis using k-means. In this post we’ll look at hierarchical cluster in R with `hclust`, a function that makes it simple to create a dendrogram (a tree diagram as in Figure 1) based on differences between observations. This type of analysis is useful in all kinds of applications from taxonomy to cancer research to time-series analysis of financial data.

# Introduction to Neural Machine Translation with GPUs (part 1)

Neural machine translation is a recently proposed framework for machine translation based purely on neural networks. This post is the first of a series in which I will explain a simple encoder-decoder model for building a neural machine translation system [Cho et al., 2014Sutskever et al., 2014Kalchbrenner and Blunsom, 2013]. In a later post I will describe how an attention mechanism can be incorporated into the simple encoder-decoder model [Bahdanau et al., 2015], leading to the state-of-the-art machine translation model for a number of language pairs including En-Fr, En-De, En-Tr and En-Zh [Gulcehre et al., 2015Jean et al., 2015]. Furthermore, I will introduce recent work which has applied this framework of neural machine translation to image and video description generation [Xu et al., 2015Li et al., 2015].

## Statistical Machine Translation

First, let’s start with a brief overview of machine translation. In fact, the name, machine translation, says everything. We want a machine to translate text in one language, which we will call the source sentence, to corresponding text in another language, which we call the target sentence. (Although ideally the machine should be able to translate a whole document from one language to another, let us concentrate in this blog post on sentence-level machine translation.)

There are multiple ways to build such a machine that can translate languages. For instance, we can ask a bilingual speaker to give us a set of rules transforming a source sentence into a correct translation. This is not a great solution, as you can imagine, because we don’t even know the set of rules underlying a single language, not to mention the rules underlying a pair of languages. It is simply hopeless to write an exhaustive set of rules for translating a source sentence into a correct translation. Hence, in this blog post, we focus on a statistical approach where those rules, either implicitly or explicitly, are automatically extracted from a large corpus of text.

This statistical approach to machine translation is called statistical machine translation. The goal is the same (build a machine that translates a sentence from one language to another), but we let the machine learn from data how to translate rather than design a set of rules for the machine (See Fig. 1 for a graphical illustration.) Learning is based on statistical methods, which should sound familiar to anyone who has taken a basic course on machine learning. In fact, statistical machine translation is nothing but a particular application of machine learning, where the task is to find a function that maps from a source sentence to a corresponding target.

# Accelerate .NET Applications with Alea GPU

Today software companies use frameworks such as .NET to target multiple platforms from desktops to mobile phones with a single code base to reduce costs by leveraging existing libraries and to cope with changing trends. While developers can easily write scalable parallel code for multi-core CPUs on .NET with libraries such as the task parallel library, they face a bigger challenge using GPUs to tackle compute intensive tasks. To accelerate .NET applications with GPUs, developers must write functions in CUDA C/C++ and write or generate code to interoperate between .NET and CUDA C/C++.

Alea GPU closes this gap by bringing GPU computing directly into the .NET ecosystem. With Alea GPU you can write GPU functions in any .NET language you like, compile with your standard .NET build tool and accelerate it with a GPU. Alea GPU offers a full implementation of all CUDA features, and code compiled with Alea GPU performs as well as equivalent CUDA C/C++ code.

## CUDA on .NET with Alea GPU

Alea GPU is a professional CUDA development stack for .NET and Mono built directly on top of the NVIDIA compiler toolchain. Alea GPU offers the following benefits:

• Easy to use
• Cross-platform
• Support for many existing GPU algorithms and libraries
• Debugging and profiling functionality
• JIT compilation and a compiler API for GPU scripting
• Future-oriented technology based on LLVM
• No compromise on performance

You can easily install Alea GPU as a Nuget package, as Figure 1 shows.

## Ease of Use

Alea GPU is easy to use for all kinds of parallel problems. Developers can write GPU code in any .NET language and use the full set of CUDA device functions provided by NVIDIA LibDevice, as well as CUDA device parallel intrinsic functions, such as thread synchrhonization, warp vote functions, warp shuffle functions, and atomic functions. Let’s consider a simple example which applies the same calculation to many data values. `SquareKernel` is a GPU kernel written in C# that accesses memory on the GPU.

```static void SquareKernel(deviceptr outputs,
deviceptr inputs, int n)
{
var start = blockIdx.x * blockDim.x + threadIdx.x;
var stride = gridDim.x * blockDim.x;
for (var i = start; i < n; i += stride)
{
outputs[i] = inputs[i] * inputs[i];
}
}```

# Deep Learning for Image Understanding in Planetary Science

I stumbled upon the above tweet by Leon Palafox, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and reached out to him to discuss his success with GPUs and share it with other developers interested in using deep learning for image processing.

### Tell us about your research at The University of Arizona

We are working on developing a tool that can automatically identify various geological processes on the surface of Mars. Examples of geological processes include impact cratering and volcanic activity; however, these processes can generate landforms that look very similar, even though they form via vastly different mechanisms. For example, small impact craters and volcanic craters can be easily confused because they can both exhibit a prominent rim surrounding a central topographic depression.

Of particular interest to our research group is the automated mapping of volcanic rootless cones as Figure 2 shows. These landforms are generated by explosive interactions between lava and ground ice, and therefore mapping the global distribution of rootless cones on Mars would contribute to a better understanding of the distribution of near-surface water on the planet. However, to do this we must first develop algorithms that can correctly distinguish between landforms of similar appearance. This is a difficult task for planetary geologists, but we are already having great success by applying state-of-the-art artificial neural networks to data acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which is onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) satellite.

# GPU Pro Tip: Track MPI Calls In The NVIDIA Visual Profiler

Often when profiling GPU-accelerated applications that run on clusters, one needs to visualize MPI (Message Passing Interface) calls on the GPU timeline in the profiler. While tools like Vampir and Tau will allow programmers to see a big picture view of how a parallel application performs, sometimes all you need is a look at how MPI is affecting GPU performance on a single node using a simple tool like the NVIDIA Visual Profiler. With the help of the NVIDIA Tools Extensions (NVTX) and the MPI standard itself, this is pretty easy to do.

The NVTX API lets you embed information within a GPU profile, such as marking events or annotating ranges in the timeline with details about application behavior during that time. Jiri Kraus wrote past posts about generating custom application timelines with NVTX, and about using it to label individual MPI ranks in MPI profiles. In this post I’ll show you how to use an NVTX range to annotate the time spent in MPI calls. To do this, we’ll use the MPI profiling interface (PMPI), which is a standard part of MPI. PMPI allows tools to intercept calls to the MPI library to perform actions before or after the MPI call is executed. This means that we can insert NVTX calls into our MPI library calls to mark MPI calls on the GPU timeline.

Wrapping every MPI routine in this way is a bit tedious, but fortunately there’s a tool to automate the process. We’ll use the `wrap.py` script found at https://github.com/scalability-llnl/wrap to generate the PMPI wrappers for a number of commonly used MPI routines. The input file for this script is the following (also available as a github gist):

```#include <pthread.h>
#include <nvToolsExt.h>
#include <nvToolsExtCudaRt.h>
// Setup event category name
{{fn name MPI_Init}}
nvtxNameCategoryA(999, "MPI");
{{callfn}}
int rank;
PMPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &rank);
char name[256];
sprintf( name, "MPI Rank %d", rank );

nvtxNameOsThread(pthread_self(), name);
nvtxNameCudaDeviceA(rank, name);
{{endfn}}
// Wrap select MPI functions with NVTX ranges
{{fn name MPI_Send MPI_Recv MPI_Allreduce MPI_Reduce MPI_Wait MPI_Waitany
MPI_Waitall MPI_Waitsome MPI_Gather MPI_Gatherv MPI_Scatter MPI_Scatterv
MPI_Allgather MPI_Allgatherv MPI_Alltoall MPI_Alltoallv MPI_Alltoallw MPI_Bcast
MPI_Sendrecv MPI_Barrier MPI_Start MPI_Test MPI_Send_init MPI_Recv_init }}
nvtxEventAttributes_t eventAttrib = {0};
eventAttrib.version = NVTX_VERSION;
eventAttrib.size = NVTX_EVENT_ATTRIB_STRUCT_SIZE;
eventAttrib.messageType = NVTX_MESSAGE_TYPE_ASCII;
eventAttrib.message.ascii  = "{{name}}";
eventAttrib.category = 999;

nvtxRangePushEx(&eventAttrib);
{{callfn}}
nvtxRangePop();
{{endfn}}
```

So what’s happening in this file? First, it includes the NVTX header file, and then loops over a series of common MPI functions and inserts the beginning of an NVTX range (`nvtxRangePushEx`) and then ends the range as we leave the MPI routine (`nvtxRangePop`). For convenience, I’ve named the range after the MPI routine being called. All I need to do now is call `wrap.py` to generate a C file with my PMPI wrappers, which I’ll then build with my MPI C compiler.

```\$ python wrap/wrap.py -g -o nvtx_pmpi.c nvtx.w
\$ mpicc -c nvtx_pmpi.c
```

Now I just need to rerun my code with these wrappers. To do this I’ll relink my application with the object file I just built and the NVTX library (libnvToolsExt). As an example, I’ll use the simple Jacobi Iteration used in the GTC session Multi GPU Programming with MPI, which you can find on Github. Once I’ve built both the application and the wrappers generated above, I run the executable as follows.

```\$ mpicc -fast -ta=tesla -Minfo=all \$HOME/nvtx_pmpi.o laplace2d.c -L\$CUDA_HOME/lib64 -lnvToolsExt -o laplace2d
\$ MV2_USE_CUDA=1 mpirun -np 2 nvprof -o laplace2d.%q{MV2_COMM_WORLD_RANK}.nvvp ./laplace2d
```

One word of caution: the linking order does matter when using tools such as PMPI, so if you run your code and are not seeing the expected results, the object file containing the wrappers may not appear early enough in the build command.

In the above commands I’m rebuilding my code with the necessary bits. I’m also setting MV2_USE_CUDA at runtime to enable cuda-awareness in my MVAPICH library. Additionally I’m informing nvprof to generate a timeline file per-MPI process by passing the MV2_COMM_WORLD_RANK environment variable to nvprof, which is defined to equal the MPI rank of each process. Figure 1 is the result of importing one of these resulting nvprof output files into Visual Profiler and then zooming in to an area of interest.

Looking in the “Markers and Ranges” row of the GPU timeline for MPI Rank 0, we see three green boxes denoting two calls to MPI_Sendrecv and one to MPI_Allreduce. Furthermore, we can see that the MPI library is using a device-to-device memcpy operation to communicate between two GPUs on the same node. As you can see, the NVIDIA Visual Profiler, combined with PMPI and NVTX can give you interesting insights into how the MPI calls in your application interact with the GPU.

# Parallel Direct Solvers with cuSOLVER: Batched QR

[Note: Lung Sheng Chien from NVIDIA also contributed to this post.]

A key bottleneck for most science and engineering simulations is the solution of sparse linear systems of equations, which can account for up to 95% of total simulation time. There are two types of solvers for these systems: iterative and direct solvers.  Iterative solvers are favored for the largest systems these days (see my earlier posts about AmgX), while direct solvers are useful for smaller systems because of their accuracy and robustness.

CUDA 7 expands the capabilities of GPU-accelerated numerical computing with cuSOLVER, a powerful new suite of direct linear system solvers.   These solvers provide highly accurate and robust solutions for smaller systems, and cuSOLVER offers a way of combining many small systems into a ‘batch’ and solving all of them in parallel, which is critical for the most complex simulations today.   Combustion models, bio-chemical models and advanced high-order finite-element models all benefit directly from this new capability.  Computer vision and object detection applications need to solve many least-squares problems, so they will also benefit from cuSOLVER.

Direct solvers rely on algebraic factorization of a matrix, which breaks a hard-to-solve matrix into two or more easy-to-solve factors, and a solver routine which uses the factors and a right hand side vector and solves them one at a time to give a highly accurate solution. Figure 1 shows an example of $LDL^T$ factorization of a dense matrix.   A solver for this factorization would first solve the transpose of L part, then apply the inverse of the D (diagonal) part in parallel, then solve again with L to arrive at the final answer. The benefit of direct solvers is that (unlike iterative solvers), they always find a solution (when the factors exist; more on this later) and once a factorization is found, solutions for many right-hand sides can be performed using the factors at a much lower cost per solution. Also, for small systems, direct solvers are typically faster than iterative methods because they only pass over the matrix once.

In this post I give an overview of cuSOLVER followed by an example of using batch QR factorization for solving many sparse systems in parallel. In a followup post I will cover other aspects of cuSOLVER, including dense system solvers and the cuSOLVER refactorization API.

# Accelerating Dissipative Particle Dynamics Simulation on Tesla GPUs

As you are probably aware, CUDA 7 was officially released during the 2015 GPU Technology Conference. For this Spotlight I took a few minutes to pick the brain of an early adopter of CUDA 7 to see how his work benefits from the new C++11 support.

I interviewed Yu-Hang Tang, a Ph.D. candidate in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

### What breakthrough project is currently taking up all of your brain’s time?

At this moment we are finalizing a particle-based simulator for the in silico investigation of microfluidic devices used in cancer diagnostic. The code enables us to predict the behavior of cancer cells as well as blood cells in various microfluidic channels. It could significantly speed up the process of microfluidic device design, which is usually time-consuming due to the large amount of trial-and-error experiments.

We will release the work by end of April and I will be happy to talk about more details by that time.

### Tell me a bit about your GPU Computing background.

I started programming on the GeForce GTX 460 GPUs using OpenCL since 2010, and in 2012 I shifted entirely to CUDA C++.

Right now, I use mostly Kepler GPUs with high double-precision floating-point performance. I have been focused on accelerating particle-based simulations including All-Atom Molecular Dynamics (AAMD), Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH).

In fact, I have developed an entire GPU package (our USERMESO package), for the LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator) particle simulator for DPD and SPH simulations. The package achieves 20x to 30x speed up on a single K20 GPU over 16 AMD CPU cores on a Cray XK7 compute node.

### How has GPU computing impacted your research?

Our USERMESO package allows us to simulate DPD systems containing several millions of particles for millions of time steps on a daily basis during the study of the self-assembly behavior of amphiphilic polymers. The multi-compartment multi-walled vesicle, or simply think of it as a miniature cell, as Figure 1 shows, is only observable at a spatial-temporal scale that is tens of times larger, and tens of times longer than that covered by typical contemporary DPD simulations. With the USERMESO code we can perform such simulations daily with just 16 GPUs!

# Get Ready for the Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge with Jetson TK1

Image recognition and GPUs go hand-in-hand, particularly when using deep neural networks (DNNs). The strength of GPU-based DNNs for image recognition has been unequivocally demonstrated by their success over the past few years in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), and DNNs have recently achieved classification accuracy on par with trained humans, as Figure 1 shows. The new Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge (LPIRC) highlights the importance of image recognition on mobile and embedded devices.

DNNs with convolutional layers are a biologically inspired artificial neural network. These networks may have five or more layers with many neurons in each layer. Links similar to synapses connect the layers, forwarding information to the next layer. The training process adjusts weights on the links, improving the network’s ability to classify the information presented to it. The more data used to train a DNN, the better its classification performance. This big data requirement has resulted in heavy GPU use, because GPUs are designed for high throughput on highly parallel computations like those used in deep learning.

ImageNet is a great resource for imagery, hosting a large database of images organized according to a hierarchy of descriptive nouns. Each year, ImageNet hosts the ILSVRC, for which entrants develop algorithms for accurately recognizing objects in the images. ImageNet provides a large image set of over 1.2 million images from 1000 different object categories for training recognition algorithms. Academic as well as industrial participants have performed strongly, with competitors from Google, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and Adobe (among many others) in recent years.

## A Low-Power Challenge

To motivate improved image recognition on low-power devices, Yung-Hsiang Lu, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, and Alex Berg, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill, are organizing the Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge (LPIRC), a competition focused on identifying the best technology in both image recognition and energy conservation. Registration for the LPIRC is now open.

Achieving high performance while maintaining low power can be challenging, as these two parameters often increase together. Last year NVIDIA released the Jetson TK1 Development Kit, a low-power GPU-accelerated computing platform that is well-suited for image processing and computer vision applications. Jetson TK1’s low power requirements and image processing capabilities will make it a popular platform for LPIRC competitors. Continue reading

# Porting Scientific Applications to GPUs at the OLCF OpenACC Hackathon

Six scientific computing teams from around the world spent an intense week late last year porting their applications to GPUs using OpenACC directives. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) hosted its first ever OpenACC Hackathon in Knoxville, Tennessee. Paired with two GPU mentors, each team of scientific developers set forth on the journey to accelerate their code with GPUs.

Dr. Misun Min, a computational scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, led the NekCEM Team and she shared the results of accelerating NekCEM with OpenACC and NVIDIA GPUDirect™ communication.

### Who were the NekCEM hackathon team members, and how much GPU computing experience did your team have?

I have only six months experience; but at the time of the Hackathon, I didn’t really have any. The other members included Matthew Otten from Cornell University (six months GPU computing experience), Jing Gong from KTH in Sweden (two years of OpenACC experience), and Azamat Mametjanov from Argonne. The team also had close interactions with Nek5000 developer Paul Fischer at UIUC for useful discussions.

### Who were your mentors?

Two mentors from Cray Inc.: Aaron Vose and John Levesque. Aaron and John provided strong technical support to boost the performance of a GPU-enabled NekCEM version.

### First, what is NekCEM?

NekCEM (Nekton for Computational ElectroMagnetics) is an open-source code designed for predictive modeling of electromagnetic systems, such as linear accelerators, semiconductors, plasmonic devices, and quantum systems described by the Maxwell, Helmholtz, drift-diffusion, and Schrödinger or density matrix equations. The code is based on high-order discretizations of the underlying partial differential equations using spectral element (SE) and spectral-element discontinuous Galerkin (SEDG) schemes that have been shown to require order-of-magnitude fewer grid points than do conventional low-order schemes for the same accuracy. NekCEM uses globally unstructured meshes comprising body-fitted curvilinear hexahedral elements, which allow the discrete operators to be expressed as matrix-matrix products applied to arrays of the tensor product basis of Lagrange interpolation polynomials on the Gauss-Lobatto-Legendre quadrature points. The tight coupling of the degrees of freedom within elements leads to efficient data reuse while requiring boundary-minimal (unit-depth-stencil) data communication to effect flux exchanges between neighboring elements.

### What were your team’s goals going into the OpenACC Hackathon?

The team had two goals: (1) to develop a high-performance GPU-based operational variant of NekCEM that supports the full functionality of the existing CPU-only code in Fortran/C and (2) to perform analysis to find performance bottlenecks and infer potential scalability for GPU-based architectures of the future. Continue reading

# cuDNN v2: Higher Performance for Deep Learning on GPUs

The cuDNN library team is excited to announce the second version of cuDNN, NVIDIA’s library of GPU-accelerated primitives for deep neural networks (DNNs). We are proud that the cuDNN library has seen broad adoption by the deep learning research community and is now integrated into major deep learning toolkits such as CAFFE, Theano and Torch. While cuDNN was conceived with developers of deep learning toolkits and systems in mind, this release is all about features and performance for the deep learning practitioner. Before we get into those details though, let’s provide some context.

## Deep Learning for Big Data

Data science and machine learning have been growing rapidly in importance in recent years, along with the volume of “big data”. Machine learning provides techniques for developing systems that can automatically recognize, categorize, locate or filter the torrent of big data that flows endlessly into corporate servers (and our email inboxes). Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become an especially successful and popular technique, because DNNs are relatively straightforward to implement and scale well—the more data you throw at them the better they perform. Most importantly, DNNs are now established as the most accurate technique across a range of problems, including image classification, object detection, and text and speech recognition. In fact, research teams from Microsoft, Google and Baidu have recently shown DNNs that perform better on an image recognition task than a trained human observer!

Deep learning and machine learning have been popular topics on Parallel Forall recently, so here are some pointers to excellent recent posts for more information. The original cuDNN announcement post provides an introduction to machine learning, deep learning and cuDNN. There are excellent posts on using cuDNN with Caffe for computer vision, with Torch for natural language understanding, on how Baidu uses cuDNN for speech recognition, and on embedded deep learning on Jetson TK1. There is also a recent post about BIDMach, an accelerated framework for machine learning techniques that are not neural network-based (SVMs, K-means, linear regression and so on). Continue reading