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An example of gamification is a contest where students get points for solving the usual exercises of the subject matter. An example of game-based learning is an escape room where students get involved in studying and solving subject matter problems to get the required hints to continue the game. In this sense, game-based learning is an instance of problem-based learning. We propose a hand-on sesion where participants will get engaged into: first, a gamification activity; and later a game-based learning (GBL) activity. They will be encouraged to notice the differences and make a distinction between them. Afterwards, participants will be required to design a simple escape room situation involving problems for their own courses.

Game-based learning is a strategy where games are used as a challenge for students to learn and apply the contents of a subject matter. In this sense, game-based learning is an instance of problem-based learning. In this paper we discuss how game based strategies can be used to motivate students to perform the actions required for each of the learning phases. Namely: motivation, information, understanding, application and validation (feed-back). Then we present the application of those strategies to the design of an escape room where computer programs are required to solve the puzzles of the game. The designed escape room is then used as a game-based strategy in an introductory seminar on the Python programming language.

We improve performance of fine-grain UPC applications by orders of magnitude.We introduce a novel shared-data localization transformation.We present a thorough performance analysis and evaluation.We show that reducing run-time calls is crucial for performance.We achieve performance comparable to C and MPI using the UPC programming model. Programs written in the Unified Parallel C (UPC) language can access any location of the entire local and remote address space via read/write operations. However, UPC programs that contain fine-grained shared accesses can exhibit performance degradation. One solution is to use the inspector-executor technique to coalesce fine-grained shared accesses to larger remote access operations. A straightforward implementation of the inspector-executor transformation results in excessive instrumentation that hinders performance.This paper addresses this issue and introduces various techniques that aim at reducing the generated instrumentation code: a shared-data localization transformation based on Constant-Stride Linear Memory Descriptors (CSLMADs) S. Aarseth, Gravitational N-Body Simulations: Tools and Algorithms, Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics, Cambridge University Press, 2003., the inlining of data locality checks and the usage of an index vector to aggregate the data. Finally, the paper introduces a lightweight loop code motion transformation to privatize shared scalars that were propagated through the loop body.A performance evaluation, using up to 2048 cores of a POWER 775, explores the impact of each optimization and characterizes the overheads of UPC programs. It also shows that the presented optimizations increase performance of UPC programs up to 1.8 × their UPC hand-optimized counterpart for applications with regular accesses and up to 6.3 × for applications with irregular accesses.

Programs written in Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages can access any location of the entire address space via standard read/write operations. However, the compiler have to create the communication mechanisms and the runtime system to use synchronization primitives to ensure the correct execution of the programs. However, PGAS programs may have fine-grained shared accesses that lead to performance degradation. One solution is to use the inspector-executor technique to determine which accesses are indeed remote and which accesses may be coalesced in larger remote access operations. A straightforward implementation of the inspector-executor in a PGAS system may result in excessive instrumentation that hinders performance. This paper introduces a shared-data localization transformation based on linear memory descriptors (LMADs) that reduces the amount of instrumentation introduced by the compiler into programs written in the UPC language and describes a prototype implementation of the proposed transformation. A performance evaluation, using up to 2048 cores of a POWER 775 supercomputer, allows for a prediction that applications with regular accesses can achieve up to 180% of the performance of handoptimized versions while applications with irregular accesses yield performance gain from 1.12X up to 6.3X speedup.

The construction of suffix trees for very long sequences is essential for many applications, and it plays a central role in the bioinformatic domain. With the advent of modern sequencing technologies, biological sequence databases have grown dramatically. Also the methodologies required to analyze these data have become more complex everyday, requiring fast queries to multiple genomes. In this article, we present parallel continuous flow (PCF), a parallel suffix tree construction method that is suitable for very long genomes. We tested our method for the suffix tree construction of the entire human genome, about 3GB. We showed that PCF can scale gracefully as the size of the input genome grows. Our method can work with an efficiency of 90% with 36 processors and 55% with 172 processors. We can index the human genome in 7 minutes using 172 processes.

Michail Alvanos∓ Programming Models Barcelona Supercomputing Center malvanos@bsc.es Gabriel Tanase IBM TJ Watson Research Center Yorktown Heights, NY, US igtanase@us.ibm.com Montse Farreras Dep. of Computer Architecture Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya mfarrera@ac.upc.edu Ettore Tiotto Static Compilation Technology IBM Toronto Laboratory etiotto@ca.ibm.com Jose Nelson Amaral Dep. of Computing Science University of Alberta jamaral@ualberta.ca Xavier Martorell Dep. of Computer Architecture Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya xavim@ac.upc.edu

The goal of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages is to improve programmer productivity in large scale parallel machines. However, PGAS programs may have many fine-grained shared accesses that lead to performance degradation. Manual code transformations or compiler optimizations are required to improve the performance of programs with fine-grained accesses. The downside of manual code transformations is the increased program complexity that hinders programmer productivity. On the other hand, most compiler optimizations of fine-grain accesses require knowledge of physical data mapping and the use of parallel loop constructs. This paper presents an optimization for the Unified Parallel C language that combines compile time (static) and runtime (dynamic) coalescing of shared data, without the knowledge of physical data mapping. Larger messages increase the network efficiency and static coalescing decreases the overhead of library calls. The performance evaluation uses two microbenchmarks and three benchmarks to obtain scaling and absolute performance numbers on up to 32768 cores of a Power 775 machine. Our results show that the compiler transformation results in speedups from 1.15X up to 21X compared with the baseline versions and that they achieve up to 63% the performance of the MPI versions.

Applications running inside data centers are enabled through the cooperation of thousands of servers arranged in racks and interconnected together through the data center network. Current DCN architectures based on electronic devices are neither scalable to face the massive growth of DCs, nor flexible enough to efficiently and cost-effectively support highly dynamic application traffic profiles. The FP7 European Project LIGHTNESS foresees extending the capabilities of today's electrical DCNs throPugh the introduction of optical packet switching and optical circuit switching paradigms, realizing together an advanced and highly scalable DCN architecture for ultra-high-bandwidth and low-latency server-to-server interconnection. This article reviews the current DC and high-performance computing (HPC) outlooks, followed by an analysis of the main requirements for future DCs and HPC platforms. As the key contribution of the article, the LIGHTNESS DCN solution is presented, deeply elaborating on the envisioned DCN data plane technologies, as well as on the unified SDN-enabled control plane architectural solution that will empower OPS and OCS transmission technologies with superior flexibility, manageability, and customizability.

Clusters of SMPs are ubiquitous. They have been traditionally programmed by using MPI. But, the productivity of MPI programmers is low because of the complexity of expressing parallelism and communication, and the difficulty of debugging. To try to ease the burden on the programmer new programming models have tried to give the illusion of a global shared-address space (e.g., UPC, Co-array Fortran). Unfortunately, these models do not support, increasingly common, irregular forms of parallelism that require asynchronous task parallelism. Other models, such as X10 or Chapel, provide this asynchronous parallelism but the programmer is required to rewrite entirely his application. We present the implementation of OmpSs for clusters, a variant of OpenMP extended to support asynchrony, heterogeneity and data movement for task parallelism. As OpenMP, it is based on decorating an existing serial version with compiler directives that are translated into calls to a runtime system that manages the parallelism extraction and data coherence and movement. Thus, the same program written in OmpSs can run in a regular SMP machine, in clusters of SMPs, or even can be used for debugging with the serial version. The runtime uses the information provided by the programmer to distribute the work across the cluster while optimizes communications using affinity scheduling and caching of data. We have evaluated our proposal with a set of kernels and the OmpSs versions obtain a performance comparable, or even superior, to the one obtained by the same version of MPI.

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages provide a unique programming model that can span shared-memory multiprocessor (SMP) architectures, distributed memory machines, or cluster of SMPs. Users can program large scale machines with easy-to-use, shared memory paradigms.

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages offer an attractive, high-productivity programming model for programming large-scale parallel machines. PGAS languages, such as Unified Parallel C (UPC), combine the simplicity of shared-memory programming with the efficiency of the message-passing paradigm by allowing users control over the data layout. PGAS languages distinguish between private, shared-local, and shared-remote memory, with shared-remote accesses typically much more expensive than shared-local and private accesses, especially on distributed memory machines where shared-remote access implies communication over a network. In this paper we present a simple extension to the UPC language that allows the programmer to block shared arrays in multiple dimensions. We claim that this extension allows for better control of locality, and therefore performance, in the language. We describe an analysis that allows the compiler to distinguish between local shared array accesses and remote shared array accesses. Local shared array accesses are then transformed into direct memory accesses by the compiler, saving the overhead of a locality check at runtime. We present results to show that locality analysis is able to significantly reduce the number of shared accesses.

The construction of suffix tree for very long sequences is essential for many applications, and it plays a central role in the bioinformatic domain. With the advent of modern sequencing technologies, biological sequence databases have grown dramatically. Also the methodologies required to analyze these data have become everyday more complex, requiring fast queries to multiple genomes. In this paper we presented Parallel Continuous Flow PCF, a parallel suffix tree construction method that is suitable for very long strings. We tested our method on the construction of suffix tree of the entire human genome, about 3GB. We showed that PCF can scale gracefully as the size of the input string grows. Our method can work with an efficiency of 90% with 36 processors and 55% with 172 processors. We can index the Human genome in 7 minutes using 172 nodes.

Communication latencies have been identified as one of the performance limiting factors of message passing applications in clusters of workstations/multiprocessors. On the receiver side, message-copying operations contribute to these communication latencies. Recently, prediction of MPI messages has been proposed as part of the design of a zero message-copying mechanism. Until now, prediction was only evaluated for the next message. Predicting only the next message, however, may not be enough for real implementations, since messages do not arrive in the same order as they are requested. In this paper, we explore long-term prediction of MPI messages for the design of a zero message-copying mechanism. To achieve long-term prediction we evaluate two prediction schemes, the first based on graphs, and the second based on periodicity detection. Our experiments indicate that with both prediction schemes the buffer addresses and message sizes of several future MPI messages (up to +10) can be predicted successfully.

Load imbalance in parallel systems can be generated by external factors to the currently running applications like operating system noise or the underlying hardware like a heterogeneous cluster. HPC applications working on irregular data structures can also have difficulties to balance their computations across the parallel tasks. In this article we extend, improve and evaluate more deeply the Task Packing mechanism proposed in a previous work. The main idea of the mechanism is to concentrate the idle cycles of unbalanced applications in such a way that one or more CPUs are freed from execution. To achieve this, CPUs are stressed with just useful work of the parallel application tasks, provided performance is not degraded. The packing is solved by an algorithm based on the Knapsack problem, in a minimum number of CPUs and using oversubscription. We design and implement a more efficient version of such mechanism. To that end, we perform the Task Packing “in place”, taking advantage of idle cycles generated at synchronization points of unbalanced applications. Evaluations are carried out on a heterogeneous platform using FT and miniFE benchmarks. Results showed that our proposal generates low overhead. In addition the amount of freed CPUs are related to a load imbalance metric which can be used as a prediction for it.

Significant progress has been made in the development of programming languages and tools that are suitable for hybrid computer architectures that group several shared-memory multicores interconnected through a network. This paper addresses important limitations in the code generation for partitioned global address space (PGAS) languages. These languages allow fine-grained communication and lead to programs that perform many fine-grained accesses to data. When the data is distributed to remote computing nodes, code transformations are required to prevent performance degradation. Until now code transformations to PGAS programs have been restricted to the cases where both the physical mapping of the data or the number of processing nodes are known at compilation time. In this paper, a novel application of the inspector-executor model overcomes these limitations and allows profitable code transformations, which result in fewer and larger messages sent through the network, when neither the data mapping nor the number of processing nodes are known at compilation time. A performance evaluation reports both scaling and absolute performance numbers on up to 32,768 cores of a Power 775 supercomputer. This evaluation indicates that the compiler transformation results in speedups between 1.15 $\times$ and 21 $\times$ over a baseline and that these automated transformations achieve up to 63 percent the performance of the MPI versions.