BENCHMARK ANALYSIS AND APPLICATION RESULTS FOR LATTICE BOLTZMANN SIMULATIONS ON NEC SX VECTOR AND INTEL NEHALEM SYSTEMS
Abstract
Classic vector systems have all but vanished from recent TOP500 lists. Looking at the recently introduced NEC SX-9 series, we benchmark its memory subsystem using the low level vector triad and employ the kernel of an advanced lattice Boltzmann flow solver to demonstrate that classic vectors still combine excellent performance with a well-established optimization approach. To investigate the multi-node performance, the flow field in a real porous medium is simulated using the hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallel ILBDC lattice Boltzmann application code. Results for a commodity Intel Nehalem-based cluster are provided for comparison. Clusters can keep up with the vector systems, however, require massive parallelism and thus much more effort to provide a good domain decomposition.
References
- Parallel Processing Letters 18(4), 453 (2008). Link, Google Scholar
- Journal of Supercomputing 39(2), 93 (2007). Crossref, ISI, Google Scholar
I. Ginzburg , J.-P. Carlier and C. Kao , Lattice Boltzmann approach to Richards' equation, Computational Methods in Water Resources: Proceedings of CMWR XV, ed.C. T. Miller (Chapel Hill, NC, USA, 2004) pp. 583–597. Google Scholar- Physical Review E 56(6), 6811 (1997). Crossref, ISI, Google Scholar
- , High Performance Computing on Vector Systems 2008, eds.
M. Resch (Springer, Berlin, 2009) pp. 3–11. Crossref, Google Scholar - J. D. McCalpin. STREAM: Sustainable memory bandwidth in high performance computers, 1991–2009 . Google Scholar
- M. Meier: Thread pinning by overloading pthread_create(). http://www.mulder.franken.de/workstuff/pthread-overload.c . Google Scholar
-
T. Pohl , Performance evaluation of parallel large-scale lattice Boltzmann applications on three supercomputing architectures , Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM SC2004 Conference ( 2004 ) . Google Scholar - International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications 17(1), 49 (2003). Crossref, ISI, Google Scholar
- W. Schönauer: Scientific Supercomputing: Addendum for NEC SX4/5. http://www.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/~rxO3/addendum/a1 . Google Scholar
- T. Schoenemeyer and H. Berger (NEC): Priv. comm. 2009 . Google Scholar
-
S. Succi , The Lattice Boltzmann Equation - For Fluid Dynamics and Beyond ( Clarendon Press , 2001 ) . Google Scholar - Computers & Fluids 35(8-9), 910 (2006). Crossref, ISI, Google Scholar
-
S. Williams , Lattice Boltzmann simulation optimization on leading multicore platforms , Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Parallel&Distributed Processing ( 2008 ) . Google Scholar - Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 69(9), 762 (2009). Crossref, ISI, Google Scholar
- Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics 8(4), 179 (2008). Crossref, ISI, Google Scholar
- , High Performance Computing in Science and Engineering '08, eds.
W. E. Nagel (Springer, Berlin, 2009) pp. 333–347. Crossref, Google Scholar -
T. Zeiser , G. Hager and G. Wellein , The world's fastest CPU and SMP node: Some performance results from the NEC SX-9 , Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing ( 2009 ) . Google Scholar


