The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Workshop:PyHPC 2020: 9th Workshop on Python for High-Performance and Scientific Computing
Authors: Vibhatha Abeykoon, Niranda Perera, Chathura Widanage, Supun Kamburugamuve, and Thejaka Amila Kanewala (Indiana University); Hasara Maithree (University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka); and Pulasthi Wickramasinghe, Ahmet Uyar, and Geoffrey C. Fox (Indiana University)
Abstract: Data engineering is becoming an increasingly important part of scientific discoveries with the adoption of deep learning and machine learning. Data engineering deals with a variety of data formats, storage, data extraction, transformation and data movements. One goal of data engineering is to transform data from original data to vector/matrix/tensor formats accepted by deep learning and machine learning applications. There are many structures such as tables, graphs and trees to represent data in these data engineering phases. Among them, tables are a versatile and commonly used format to load and process data. In this paper, we present a distributed Python API based on table abstraction for representing and processing data. Unlike existing state-of-the-art data engineering tools written purely in Python, our solution adopts high-performance compute kernels in C++, with an in-memory table representation with Cython-based Python bindings. In the core system, we use MPI for distributed memory computations with a data-parallel approach for processing large datasets in HPC clusters.