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Many data analytics and scientific applications rely on data transformation tasks, such as encoding, decoding, parsing of structured and unstructured data, and conversions between data formats and layouts. Previous work has shown that data transformation can represent a performance bottleneck for data analytics workloads. The transducers computational abstraction can be used to express a wide range of data transformations, and recent efforts have proposed configurable engines implementing various transducer models (from finite state transducers, to pushdown transducers, to extended models). This line of research, however, is still at an early stage. Notably, expressing data transformation using transducers requires a paradigm shift, impacting programmability. To address this problem, we propose a programming framework to map data transformation tasks onto a variety of transducer models. Our framework includes: (1) a platform agnostic programming language (xPTLang) to code transducer programs using intuitive programming constructs, and (2) a compiler that, given an xPTLang program, generates efficient transducer processing engines for CPU and GPU. Our compiler includes a set of optimizations to improve code efficiency. We demonstrate our framework on a diverse set of data transformation tasks on an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GPU. 

Scientific simulations running on HPC facilities generate massive amount of data, putting significant pressure onto supercomputers’ storage capacity and network bandwidth. To alleviate this problem, there has been a rich body of work on reducing data volumes via error-controlled lossy compression. However, fixed-ratio compression is not very well-supported, not allowing users to appropriately allocate memory/storage space or know the data transfer time over the network in advance. To address this problem, recent ratio-controlled frameworks, such as FXRZ, have incorporated methods to predict required error bound settings to reach a user-specified compression ratio. However, these approaches fail to achieve fixed-ratio compression in an accurate, efficient and scalable fashion on diverse datasets and compression algorithms. This work proposes an efficient, scalable, ratio-controlled lossy compression framework (CAROL). At the core of CAROL are four optimization strategies that allow for improving the prediction accuracy and runtime efficiency over state-of-the-art solutions. First, CAROL uses surrogate-based compression ratio estimation to generate training data. Second, it includes a novel calibration method to improve prediction accuracy across a variety of compressors. Third, it leverages Bayesian optimization to allow for efficient training and incremental model refinement. Forth, it uses GPU acceleration to speed up prediction. We evaluate CAROL on four compression algorithms and six scientific datasets. On average, when compared to the state-of-the-art FXRZ framework, CAROL achieves 4 × speedup in setup time and 36 × speedup in inference time, while maintaining less than 1% difference in estimation accuracy. 

Data transformation tasks are a critical and costly part of many data processing and analytics applications. A simple computing model that can efficiently represent data transformation and be mapped to different platforms can provide programmers with the flexibility o f u sing different data representations and allow for exploiting different platforms, including general-purpose processors and accelerators.We propose extended Deterministic Finite State Transducers (DFST+s), a computing model that enables the compact expression of data transformations (a significantly terser expression compared to the DFSTs model, a traditional computational abstraction for data transformation), aiding their correct and efficient implementation. We define the TF ORM language to facilitate expressing the DFST+, and the TFORM virtual machine to enable a further compact expression, leading to a high performance and portable implementation. We propose two TFORM VM execution models and evaluate them using a variety of data transformations (from Apache Parquet file format and sparse matrices). Our results show both effective portability across CPU and a hardware accelerator, and performance increases of 1.7× and 11.7× geometric mean, respectively, over a custom CPU implementation of the same transformations. 

With the rise of machine learning and data analytics, the ability to process large and diverse sets of data efficiently has become crucial. Research has shown that data transformation is a key performance bottleneck for applications across a variety of domains, from data analytics to scientific computing. Custom hardware accelerators and GPU implementations targeting specific data transformation tasks can alleviate the problem, but suffer from narrow applicability and lack of generality.To tackle this problem, we propose a GPU-accelerated data transformation engine grounded on pushdown transducers. We define an extended pushdown transducer abstraction (effPDT) that allows expressing a wide range of data transformations in a memory-efficient fashion, and is thus amenable for GPU deployment. The effPDT execution engine utilizes a data streaming model that reduces the application’s memory requirements significantly, facilitating deployment on high- and low-end systems. We showcase our GPU-accelerated engine on a diverse set of transformation tasks covering data encoding/decoding, parsing and querying of structured data, and matrix transformation, and we evaluate it against publicly available CPU and GPU library implementations of the considered data transformation tasks. To understand the benefits of the effPDT abstraction, we extend our data transformation engine to also support finite state transducers (FSTs), we map the considered data transformation tasks on FSTs, and we compare the performance and resource requirements of the FST-based and the effPDT-based implementations.