Project Proposal: Trinity

[Volker Simonis]

Hi Karthik,

thanks a lot for your quick answer and the detailed description of the
project's goals and relation to the other projects. This all sounds
reasonable and very interesting! I wish I'll find some time to take a
deeper look at your project :)

Wish you all the best,
Volker


On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 6:57 AM, Karthik Ganesan
<karthik.ganesan at oracle.com> wrote:
> Hi Volker,
>
> Thanks for your comments and the relevant questions. We have reviewed
> projects Sumatra and Panama and talked to members who are familiar with the
> projects.
>
> Project Sumatra was aimed at translation of Java byte code to execute on
> GPU, which was an ambitious goal and a challenging task to take up. In this
> project, we aim to come up with APIs targeting the most common Analytics
> operations that can be readily offloaded to accelerators transparently. Most
> of the information needed for offload to the accelerator is expected to be
> readily provided by the API semantics and there by, simplifying the need to
> do tedious byte code analysis.
>
> While the vector API (part of Panama) brings some most wanted abstraction
> for vectors, it is still loop based and is most useful for superword type of
> operations leveraging SIMD units on general purpose cores. The aim of this
> proposed project is to provide a more abstract API (similar to the Streams
> API) that will directly work on streams of data and transparently
> accommodate a wider set of heterogeneous accelerators like DAX, GPUs
> underneath. Initially, the project will focus on coming up with a complete
> set of APIs, relevant input/output formats, optimized data structures and
> storage format that can be used as building blocks to build high performance
> analytics applications/frameworks in Java. Simple examples of such
> operations will include Scan, select, filter, lookup, transcode, merge, sort
> etc. Additionally, this project will also require more functionality like
> operating system library calls, handling Garbage Collection needs amidst
> offload etc.
>
> The artifacts provided by Project Panama including the code snippets (or
> even the Vector API) along with value types from project Valhalla will come
> in handy to be leveraged wherever it is applicable in this project. Overall,
> I feel that the goals of this project and the needed work are different from
> what the Vector API is targeting. Hope this answers your question.
>
> Regards,
>
> Karthik
>
>
> On 11/14/2016 10:49 AM, Volker Simonis wrote:
>>
>> Hi Karthik,
>>
>> we had project "Sumatra" [1] for this which is inactive since quite some
>> time.
>> We also have project "Panama" [2] which, as far as I understand, is
>> also looking into auto-parallelization/vectorization. See for example
>> the "Vectors for Java" presentation from JavaOne which describes some
>> very similar ideas to yours.
>>
>> What justifies the creation of yet another project instead of doing
>> this work in the context of the existing projects?
>> What in your approach is different to the one described in [3] which
>> is already, at least partially, implemented in project Panama?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Volker
>>
>> [1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/sumatra/
>> [2] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/panama/
>> [3]
>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/conferences/2016-JavaOne/j1-2016-vectors-for-java-CON1560.pdf
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 5:23 PM, Karthik Ganesan
>> <karthik.ganesan at oracle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I would like to propose the creation of a new Project: Project Trinity.
>>>
>>> This Project would explore enhanced execution of bulk aggregate
>>> calculations
>>> over Streams through offloading calculations to hardware accelerators.
>>>
>>> Streams allow developers to express calculations such that data
>>> parallelism
>>> can be efficiently exploited. Such calculations are prime candidates for
>>> leveraging enhanced data-oriented instructions on CPUs (such as SIMD
>>> instructions) or offloading to hardware accelerators (such as the SPARC
>>> Data
>>> Accelerator co-processor, further referred to as DAX [1]).
>>>
>>> To identify a path to improving performance and power efficiency, Project
>>> Trinity will explore how libraries like Streams can be enhanced to
>>> leverage
>>> data processing hardware features to execute Streams more efficiently.
>>>
>>> Directions for exploration include:
>>> - Building a streams-like library optimized for offload to
>>> -- hardware accelerators (such as DAX), or
>>> -- a GPU, or
>>> -- SIMD instructions;
>>> - Optimizations in the Graal compiler to automatically transform suitable
>>> Streams pipelines, taking advantage of data processing hardware features;
>>> - Explorations with Project Valhalla to expand the range of effective
>>> acceleration to Streams of value types.
>>>
>>> Success will be evaluated based upon:
>>> (1) speedups and resource efficiency gains achieved for a broad range of
>>> representative streams calculations under offload,
>>> (2) ease of use of the hardware acceleration capability, and
>>> (3) ensuring that there is no time or space overhead for non-accelerated
>>> calculations.
>>>
>>> Can I please request the support of the Core Libraries Group as the
>>> Sponsoring Group with myself as the Project Lead.
>>>
>>> Warm Regards,
>>> Karthik Ganesan
>>>
>>> [1] https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-994842
>>>
>