[petsc-dev] Questions around benchmarking and data loading with PETSc

[Rohan Yadav]

Thanks all for the help, the main problem was the lack of optimization
flags in the default build provided by my system. A manual installation
with optimization flags delivers performance equal to the single node
benchmark I discussed before.

Rohan

On Sat, Dec 11, 2021 at 4:04 PM Rohan Yadav <rohany at alumni.cmu.edu> wrote:

> > The matrix market file in text format is not good for load.  One should
> convert it to petsc binary format (only once), and use the new binary file
> afterwards.
>
> Yes, I understand this. The point I'm trying to make is that using PETSc
> to even perform the initial conversion from matrix market to the binary
> format was prohibitively slow using `MatSetValues`.
>
> > I meant 10 lines of code without any function call, which can be
> thought of as a textbook implementation of SpMV. As a baseline, one can
> apply optimizations to it.  PETSc does not do sophisticated sparse matrix
> optimization itself, instead it relies on third-party libraries.  I
> remember we had OSKI from Berkeley for CPU, and on GPU we use cuSparse,
> hipSparse, MKLSparse or Kokkos-Kernels. If TACO is good, then petsc can add
> an interface to it too.
>
> Yes, this is what I expected. Given that PETSc uses high-performance
> kernels for for the sparse matrix operation itself, I was surprised to see
> that the single-thread performance of PETSc to be closer to a baseline like
> TACO. This performance will likely improve when I compile PETSc with
> optimization flags.
>
> Rohan
>
> On Sat, Dec 11, 2021 at 1:04 PM Junchao Zhang <junchao.zhang at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 11, 2021 at 10:28 AM Rohan Yadav <rohany at alumni.cmu.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Junchao,
>>>
>>> Thanks for the response!
>>>
>>> > You can use https://petsc.org/main/src/mat/tests/ex72.c.html to
>>> convert a Matrix Market file into a petsc binary file. And then in your
>>> test, load the binary matrix, following this example
>>> https://petsc.org/main/src/mat/tutorials/ex1.c.html
>>>
>>> I tried an example like this, but the performance was too slow (it would
>>> process ~2000-3000 calls to `SetValue` a second), which is not reasonable
>>> for loading matrices with millions of non-zeros.
>>>
>> The matrix market file in text format is not good for load.  One should
>> convert it to petsc binary format (only once), and use the new binary file
>> afterwards.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> > I don't know what "No Races" means, but it seems you'd better also
>>> verify the result of SpMV.
>>>
>>> This is a correct implementation of SpMV. The no-races is fine as it
>>> parallelizes over the rows of the matrix, and thus does not need
>>> synchronization between writes to the output.
>>>
>>> > You can think petsc's default CSR spmv is the baseline,  which is
>>> done in ~10 lines of code.
>>>
>>> I'm sorry, but I don't think that is a reasonable statement w.r.t to the
>>> lines of code making it a good baseline. The TACO compiler also can be used
>>> in 10 lines of code to compute an SpMV, or any other state-of-the-art
>>> library could wrap an SpMV implementation behind a single function call.
>>> I'm wondering if this performance I'm seeing using PETSc is expected, or if
>>> I've misconfigured or am misusing the system in some way.
>>>
>> I meant 10 lines of code without any function call, which can be thought
>> of as a textbook implementation of SpMV. As a baseline, one can apply
>> optimizations to it.  PETSc does not do sophisticated sparse matrix
>> optimization itself, instead it relies on third-party libraries.  I
>> remember we had OSKI from Berkeley for CPU, and on GPU we use cuSparse,
>> hipSparse, MKLSparse or Kokkos-Kernels. If TACO is good, then petsc can add
>> an interface to it too.
>>
>>
>>> Rohan
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 11:39 PM Junchao Zhang <junchao.zhang at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 8:05 PM Rohan Yadav <rohany at alumni.cmu.edu>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi, I’m Rohan, a student working on compilation techniques for
>>>>> distributed tensor computations. I’m looking at using PETSc as a baseline
>>>>> for experiments I’m running, and want to understand if I’m using PETSc as
>>>>> it was intended to achieve high performance, and if the performance I’m
>>>>> seeing is expected. Currently, I’m just looking at SpMV operations.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> My experiments are run on the Lassen Supercomputer (
>>>>> https://hpc.llnl.gov/hardware/platforms/lassen). The system has 40
>>>>> CPUs, 4 V100s and an Infiniband interconnect. A visualization of the
>>>>> architecture is here:
>>>>> https://hpc.llnl.gov/sites/default/files/power9-AC922systemDiagram2_1.png
>>>>> .
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> As of now, I’m trying to understand the single-node performance of
>>>>> PETSc, as the scaling performance onto multiple nodes appears to be as I
>>>>> expect. I’m using the arabic-2005 sparse matrix from the SuiteSparse matrix
>>>>> collection, detailed here: https://sparse.tamu.edu/LAW/arabic-2005.
>>>>> As a trusted baseline, I am comparing against SpMV code generated by the
>>>>> TACO compiler (
>>>>> http://tensor-compiler.org/codegen.html?expr=y(i)%20=%20A(i,j)%20*%20x(j)&format=y:d:0;A:ds:0,1;x:d:0&sched=split:i:i0:i1:32;reorder:i0:i1:j;parallelize:i0:CPU%20Thread:No%20Races)
>>>>> .
>>>>>
>>>> I don't know what "No Races" means, but it seems you'd better also
>>>> verify the result of SpMV.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> My experiments find that PETSc is roughly 4 times slower on a single
>>>>> thread and node than the kernel generated by TACO:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> PETSc: 1 Thread: 5694.72 ms, 1 Node 40 threads: 262.6 ms.
>>>>>
>>>>> TACO: 1 Thread: 1341 ms, 1 Node 40 threads: 86 ms.
>>>>>
>>>> You can think petsc's default CSR spmv is the baseline,  which is done
>>>> in ~10 lines of code.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> My code using PETSc is here:
>>>>> https://github.com/rohany/taco/blob/9e0e30b16bfba5319b15b2d1392f35376952f838/petsc/benchmark.cpp#L38
>>>>> .
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Runs from 1 thread and 1 node with -log_view are attached to the
>>>>> email. The command lines for each were as follows:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 1 node 1 thread: `jsrun -n 1 -c 1 -r 1 -b rs ./bin/benchmark -n 20
>>>>> -warmup 10 -matrix $TENSOR_DIR/arabic-2005.petsc -log_view`
>>>>>
>>>>> 1 node 40 threads: `jsrun -n 40 -c 1 -r 40 -b rs ./bin/benchmark -n 20
>>>>> -warmup 10 -matrix $TENSOR_DIR/arabic-2005.petsc -log_view`
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> In addition to these benchmarking concerns, I wanted to share my
>>>>> experiences trying to load data from Matrix Market files into PETSc, which
>>>>> ended up 1being much more difficult than I anticipated. Essentially, trying
>>>>> to iterate through the Matrix Market files and using `write` to insert
>>>>> entries into a `Mat` was extremely slow. In order to get reasonable
>>>>> performance, I had to use an external utility to basically construct a CSR
>>>>> matrix, and then pass the arrays from the CSR Matrix into
>>>>> `MatCreateSeqAIJWithArrays`. I couldn’t find any more guidance on PETSc
>>>>> forums or Google, so I wanted to know if this was the right way to go.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Rohan Yadav
>>>>>
>>>>
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