Phylanx Report: September 2019

The twenty-fifth month of work focused on work in the following areas:

• Cross platform support for Traveler-Integrated
• 4D primitive support
• Improved support for Docker containers

Organizational Activities and Results

• Weekly group-meeting, minutes:
  • September 4th: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LHfTOrKK2T4BdW5hdNq37MeFxlFnYN_h
  • September 11th: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vIXJ-3QB_htYuBpWbqvsLvA0q2kF1tMQ
  • September 18th: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ayTlVjO1dkjKPKnb3P3D5NcWAQ03OUBF
  • September 25th: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mHo2B5KXjKeQDB9KP0oV5LYG5CTb5CDs
• Phylanx Seminars:
  • Blaze CUDA: http://phylanx.stellar-group.org/index.php/2019/09/11/phylanx-seminar-blaze-cuda/
  • The Container Talk: http://phylanx.stellar-group.org/index.php/2019/09/25/phylanx-seminar-the-container-talk/

Development Activities and Results

• Traveler
  • Refactored Traveler-Integrated to work on MacOS and Ubuntu
    • Already worked on Windows
  • Updated Atria instances to support linked highlighting and Ctrl-F search for text within the visualization
    • Stand-alone & Traveler-Integrated
  • Improvements to Traveler-Integrated Gantt view in terms of highlighting primitives of the same type.
  • Traveler-Integrated backend changes to support dependency-analysis between tasks in trace files (e.g., Gantt views)
• Tiling
  • Theory:
    • Derived an on online sub modular function maximization with respect to a greedy algorithm
    • Some observations were made on the online min cut on random graph
  • Implementation
    • Work on the distributed matrix matrix dot operation
    • Developing windows build scripts
    • Implementing an annotation comparison operator
• Primitives & Algorithms
  • 4D support was added to the following:
    • squeeze operation (PR #1043)
    • conv2d operation (PR #1042)
    • logical operation (PR #1039)
    • transpose operation (PR #1030)
  • Bias_add operation was added (PR #1031)
  • Updated resize_images(PR #1034) and pool2d(PR #1033) to accept 4d arrays as input
• Python
  • Wrote utility scripts to build, run and manage docker images based on both ‘docker-compose.yml’ and ‘Dockerfile’ files
    • This will allow users to:
      • build desired environment (development, performance analysis, or release) by passing a few parameters to the script
      • Dynamically build and deploy Phylanx environments.
  • Studying performance of the blaze library and approaches to improve it.
    • Focused on BBLAS (Batched BLAS) library as an alternative back-end to Blaze
      • This will help us:
        • Achieving better performance for applications dealing with many operations on small matrices (convolution, FEM, …)
        • Gain full control over blocking for any granularity

Repository Activity September 1st – September 30st:

Code statistics

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C++                            475          18638           6140          94277
C/C++ Header                   311           6925           4324          33793
Python                         137           2577           1795           6796
CMake                          109            954            791           4018
YAML                             2             24             77            670
Markdown                         2             17              0             46
Dockerfile                       2              6             28             44
CSS                              1             14             10             38
HTML                             2              5              6             22
DOS Batch                        2              0              0             12
INI                              1              0              0              8
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          1044          29160          13171         139724
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Impact on Other Projects

• Vcpkg:
  • [hpx] Redirect –head to `stable` (PR #8259)
• HPX Pull Requests:
  • Moving more facilities to the collectives module (PR #4069)
  • Adding option allowing to force using Boost.FileSystem (PR #4081)
  • Making sure C++ standard is properly detected and propagated (PR #4108)
  • Fixing performance regression introduced earlier (PR #4111)
• Blaze Tensor
  • Adding missing QuatSliceTrait to ArrayTransExpr (PR #45)
  • Fixing reduction of arrays (PR #46)
  • More fixes for 4D reductions (PR #47)
  • More work on turning QuatTrans into a view (PR #49)
  • Picking up C++ standard from HPX if HPX backend is used (PR #50)
  • Some more work on turning QuatTrans into a view (PR #51)
• Blaze Iterative
  • Add test files for all algorithm except unmerged Preconditioned BiCGSTAB(l) (PR #9)
  • Add circle-ci config (PR #10)
  • Add tests (PR #11)
  • Add circl-ci banner (PR #12)
  • Test files (PR #13)
  • Remove un-tested PreconditionedBiCGSTABL and BiCGSTABL algorithms (PR #14)
  • Remove non-symmetric preconditioners (PR #15)