Project Proposal: Trinity

Wed Nov 16 22:39:55 UTC 2016

Hi Vladimir,

Thanks for the support. I certainly agree with you regarding the value 
in collaboration between the ongoing vector API efforts and this 
project, going forward. I believe that the tools that will be provided 
by Panama and Valhalla have set the stage to start exploring something 
like Trinity, which may either consume some of these artifacts and/or 
choose to improve/expand them over the course of this project. It would 
be great if the members familiar with Vector API can participate in the 
initial discussions of this project and help steer the relevant aspects 
of Trinity in the right direction.

Regards,
Karthik

On 16-11-16 05:01 AM, Vladimir Ivanov wrote:
> Thanks for the clarifications, Karthik.
>
> Have you considered conducting the experiments in Project Panama?
>
> IMO the goals you stated fit Panama really well. There are different 
> directions being explored at the momemnt and most of them are relevant 
> for the project you propose.
>
> Though current explorations in Vector API are primarily focused on 
> SIMD support, there are no inherent barriers in extending the scope to 
> GPUs and special-purpose HW accelerators. It doesn't mean in any way 
> it should be part of Vector API work, but both projects should win 
> from such collaboration.
>
> During explorations you can rely on new FFI, foreign data layout 
> support, machine code snippets, and value types (since they are 
> important for Panama, there will be regular syncs between projects and 
> the engineering costs can be amortized).
>
> Overall, I expect all participants to benefit from such synergy.
>
> Best regards,
> Vladimir Ivanov
>
> On 11/15/16 8:57 AM, Karthik Ganesan 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
>>>>
>>