PNNL

Abstract

Long viewed as a strong statistical inference technique, Bayesian networks have emerged to be an important class of applications for high-performance computing. We have applied an architecture-conscious approach to parallelizing the Lauritzen-Spiegelhalter Junction Tree algorithm for exact inferencing in Bayesian networks. In optimizing the Junction Tree algorithm, we have implemented both in-clique and topological parallelism strategies to best leverage the fine-grained synchronization and massive-scale multithreading of the Cray XMT architecture. Two topological techniques were developed to parallelize the evidence propagation process through the Bayesian network. One technique involves performing intelligent scheduling of junction tree nodes based on its topology and relative size. The second technique involves decomposing the junction tree into a much finer tree-like representation to offer much more opportunities for parallelism. We evaluate these optimizations on five different Bayesian networks and report our findings and observations. Another important contribution of this paper is to demonstrate the application of massive-scale multithreading for load balancing and use of implicit parallelism-based compiler optimizations in designing scalable inferencing algorithms.