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1. Efficient Parallel Output-Sensitive Edit Distance

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2023.40  

   Ding, Xiangyun ; Dong, Xiaojun ; Gu, Yan ; Liu, Youzhe ; Sun, Yihan ( September 2023 , 31st Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2023))

   Gørtz, Inge Li ; Farach-Colton, Martin ; Puglisi, Simon J. ; Herman, Grzegorz (Ed.)

   In this paper, we study efficient parallel edit distance algorithms, both in theory and in practice. Given two strings A[1..n] and B[1..m], and a set of operations allowed to edit the strings, the edit distance between A and B is the minimum number of operations required to transform A into B. In this paper, we use edit distance to refer to the Levenshtein distance, which allows for unit-cost single-character edits (insertions, deletions, substitutions). Sequentially, a standard Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm solves edit distance with Θ(nm) cost. In many real-world applications, the strings to be compared are similar to each other and have small edit distances. To achieve highly practical implementations, we focus on output-sensitive parallel edit-distance algorithms, i.e., to achieve asymptotically better cost bounds than the standard Θ(nm) algorithm when the edit distance is small. We study four algorithms in the paper, including three algorithms based on Breadth-First Search (BFS), and one algorithm based on Divide-and-Conquer (DaC). Our BFS-based solution is based on the Landau-Vishkin algorithm. We implement three different data structures for the longest common prefix (LCP) queries needed in the algorithm: the classic solution using parallel suffix array, and two hash-based solutions proposed in this paper. Our DaC-based solution is inspired by the output-insensitive solution proposed by Apostolico et al., and we propose a non-trivial adaption to make it output-sensitive. All of the algorithms studied in this paper have good theoretical guarantees, and they achieve different tradeoffs between work (total number of operations), span (longest dependence chain in the computation), and space. We test and compare our algorithms on both synthetic data and real-world data, including DNA sequences, Wikipedia texts, GitHub repositories, etc. Our BFS-based algorithms outperform the existing parallel edit-distance implementation in ParlayLib in all test cases. On cases with fewer than 10⁵ edits, our algorithm can process input sequences of size 10⁹ in about ten seconds, while ParlayLib can only process sequences of sizes up to 10⁶ in the same amount of time. By comparing our algorithms, we also provide a better understanding of the choice of algorithms for different input patterns. We believe that our paper is the first systematic study in the theory and practice of parallel edit distance. 

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2. An Evaluation of Task-Parallel Frameworks for Sparse Solvers on Multicore and Manycore CPU Architectures

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3472456.3472476  

   Alperen, Abdullah ; Afibuzzaman, Md ; Rabbi, Fazlay ; Ozkaya, M. Yusuf ; Catalyurek, Umit ; Aktulga, Hasan Metin ( August 2021 , ICPP 2021: 50th International Conference on Parallel Processing)

   Recently, several task-parallel programming models have emerged to address the high synchronization and load imbalance issues as well as data movement overheads in modern shared memory architectures. OpenMP, the most commonly used shared memory parallel programming model, has added task execution support with dataflow dependencies. HPX and Regent are two more recent runtime systems that also support the dataflow execution model and extend it to distributed memory environments. We focus on parallelization of sparse matrix computations on shared memory architectures. We evaluate the OpenMP, HPX and Regent runtime systems in terms of performance and ease of implementation, and compare them against the traditional BSP model for two popular eigensolvers, Lanczos and LOBPCG. We give a general outline in regards to achieving parallelism using these runtime systems, and present a heuristic for tuning their performance to balance tasking overheads with the degree of parallelism that can be exposed. We then demonstrate their merits on two architectures, Intel Broadwell (a multicore processor) and AMD EPYC (a modern manycore processor). We observe that these frameworks achieve up to 13.7 × fewer cache misses over an efficient BSP implementation across L1, L2 and L3 cache layers. They also obtain up to 9.9 × improvement in execution time over the same BSP implementation. 

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3. Joinable Parallel Balanced Binary Trees

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3512769  

   Blelloch, Guy ; Ferizovic, Daniel ; Sun, Yihan ( June 2022 , ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing)

   In this article, we show how a single function,join, can be used to implement parallelbalanced binary search trees(BSTs) simply and efficiently. Based onjoin, our approach applies to multiple balanced tree data structures, and a variety of functions for ordered sets and maps. We describe our technique as an algorithmic framework calledjoin-based algorithms. We show that thejoinfunction fully captures what is needed for rebalancing trees for a variety of tree algorithms, as long as the balancing scheme satisfies certain properties, which we refer to asjoinabletrees. We discuss four balancing schemes that are joinable: AVL trees, red-black trees, weight-balanced trees, and treaps. We present a variety of tree algorithms that apply to joinable trees, includinginsert,delete,union,intersection,difference,split,range,filter, and so on, most of them also parallel. These algorithms are generic across balancing schemes. Many algorithms are optimal in the comparison model, and we provide a general proof to show the efficiency in work for joinable trees. The algorithms are highly parallel, all with polylogarithmic span (parallel dependence). Specifically, the set-set operationsunion,intersection, anddifferencehave work\( O(m\log (\frac{n}{m}+1)) \)and polylogarithmic span for input set sizes\( n \)and\( m\le n \).

   We implemented and tested our algorithms on the four balancing schemes. In general, all four schemes have quite similar performance, but the weight-balanced tree slightly outperforms the others. They have the same speedup characteristics, getting around 73\( \times \)speedup on 72 cores (144 hyperthreads). Experimental results also show that our implementation outperforms existing parallel implementations, and our sequential version achieves close or much better performance than the sequential merging algorithm in C++ Standard Template Library (STL) on various input sizes.

    

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4. An Introduction to hpxMP: A Modern OpenMP Implementation Leveraging HPX, An Asynchronous Many-Task System

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3318170.3318191  

   Zhang, Tianyi ; Shirzad, Shahrzad ; Diehl, Patrick ; Tohid, R. ; Wei, Weile ; Kaiser, Hartmut ( January 2019 , IWOCL'19 Proceedings of the International Workshop on OpenCL)

   Asynchronous Many-task (AMT) runtime systems have gained increasing acceptance in the HPC community due to the performance improvements offered by fine-grained tasking runtime systems. At the same time, C++ standardization efforts are focused on creating higher-level interfaces able to replace OpenMP or OpenACC in modern C++ codes. These higher level functions have been adopted in standards conforming runtime systems such as HPX, giving users the ability to simply utilize fork-join parallelism in their own codes. Despite innovations in runtime systems and standardization efforts users face enormous challenges porting legacy applications. Not only must users port their own codes, but often users rely on highly optimized libraries such as BLAS and LAPACK which use OpenMP for parallization. Current efforts to create smooth migration paths have struggled with these challenges, especially as the threading systems of AMT libraries often compete with the treading system of OpenMP. To overcome these issues, our team has developed hpxMP, an implementation of the OpenMP standard, which utilizes the underlying AMT system to schedule and manage tasks. This approach leverages the C++ interfaces exposed by HPX and allows users to execute their applications on an AMT system without changing their code. In this work, we compare hpxMP with Clang's OpenMP library with four linear algebra benchmarks of the Blaze C++ library. While hpxMP is often not able to reach the same performance, we demonstrate viability for providing a smooth migration for applications but have to be extended to benefit from a more general task based programming model. 

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5. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs):37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023)

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.13  

   Jin, Feiyang ; Yu, Lechen ; Cogumbreiro, Tiago ; Shirako, Jun ; Sarkar, Vivek ( January 2023 , European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming)

   Ali, Karim ; Salvaneschi, Guido (Ed.)

   Much of the past work on dynamic data-race and determinacy-race detection algorithms for task parallelism has focused on structured parallelism with fork-join constructs and, more recently, with future constructs. This paper addresses the problem of dynamic detection of data-races and determinacy-races in task-parallel programs with promises, which are more general than fork-join constructs and futures. The motivation for our work is twofold. First, promises have now become a mainstream synchronization construct, with their inclusion in multiple languages, including C++, JavaScript, and Java. Second, past work on dynamic data-race and determinacy-race detection for task-parallel programs does not apply to programs with promises, thereby identifying a vital need for this work. This paper makes multiple contributions. First, we introduce a featherweight programming language that captures the semantics of task-parallel programs with promises and provides a basis for formally defining determinacy using our semantics. This definition subsumes functional determinacy (same output for same input) and structural determinacy (same computation graph for same input). The main theoretical result shows that the absence of data races is sufficient to guarantee determinacy with both properties. We are unaware of any prior work that established this result for task-parallel programs with promises. Next, we introduce a new Dynamic Race Detector for Promises that we call DRDP. DRDP is the first known race detection algorithm that executes a task-parallel program sequentially without requiring the serial-projection property; this is a critical requirement since programs with promises do not satisfy the serial-projection property in general. Finally, the paper includes experimental results obtained from an implementation of DRDP. The results show that, with some important optimizations introduced in our work, the space and time overheads of DRDP are comparable to those of more restrictive race detection algorithms from past work. To the best of our knowledge, DRDP is the first determinacy race detector for task-parallel programs with promises. 

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