Implementing data parallelisation in a Nested-Sampling Monte Carlo algorithm

Vanderbauwhede, W. , Lewis, S. and Ireland, D. (2013) Implementing data parallelisation in a Nested-Sampling Monte Carlo algorithm. In: 2013 International Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS), Helsinki, Finland, 1-5 July 2013, pp. 512-518. (doi: 10.1109/HPCSim.2013.6641462)

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Publisher's URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HPCSim.2013.6641462

Abstract

In this paper we report our work on the parallelisation of a Nested Sampling Monte Carlo algorithm used in the nuclear physics field of hadron spectroscopy. The purpose of the application is to fit a set of parameters in a nuclear physics model based on the observations of the beam properties. We used both OpenCL and OpenMP to parallelise the existing code. Our aims were to achieve parallelisation with minimal changes to the original source code and to evaluate the performance of the parallel code on both a GPU and a multicore CPU. On the implementation side, we show that by using our OclWrapper abstraction over the OpenCL API, integration of OpenCL code into and existing C++ code base is much simplified, to the extent that integrating OpenCL is not considerably more effort than using OpenMP, as the main effort is in making the code suitable for parallel execution. Our evaluation shows that the best results depend strongly on the size of dataset. For large numbers of events (105), we achieved a best speed-up of 22 times using OpenCL on the CPU. For small numbers of events (103), we achieved a best speed-up of 4 times using OpenMP on the CPU. The best GPU speed-up was 7 times for 105 events. This is mainly a result of the longer data transfer time, which negates the improvement in computation time.

Item Type:Conference Proceedings
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Vanderbauwhede, Professor Wim and Ireland, Professor David and Lewis, Dr Stefanie
Authors: Vanderbauwhede, W., Lewis, S., and Ireland, D.
College/School:College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
College of Science and Engineering > School of Physics and Astronomy
College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences

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