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Tech Report: Overflow Solver Performance on 512 CPU Origin

	Posted Tue May 08, 2001 @04:32PM
	The researchers at NASA Ames have developed a new highly-scalable parallelism technique for use with the Overflow CFD code. The new method, termed Multi-Level Parallelism (MLP), was designed to be simpler and more scalable than MPI. MLP was specifically designed for the new large CPU count shared memory systems. Building on their success with Overflow, a Chimera grid based CFD solver, on a 256 CPU SGI Origin 2000, the Ames team applied the code to a new 512 processor Origin 2000.

	The machine The 512 CPU Origin 2000 used by the team is unique in that it is the world's first 512 CPU, shared memory symmetric multi-processing system in the world. The machine was specially built for NASA Ames by SGI and was demonstrated to scale well to 512 processes once a few OS performance problems were sorted out. The problems The main difficulty was in scaling the parallelism up by a factor of 2 on the same grid which had been used previously on the 256 CPU machine since the researchers were interested in reducing the solution time for the given problem, and not in solving a larger problem. This introduced problems with scaling the inner loops in the code and remote memory access latency, which did not affect the results on the 256 processsor machine. The results By optimizing the Overflow code further, the Ames team was able to get the results to scale linearly up to 512 processors on the full aircraft simulation (35 million node grid). A fully converged solution of the full aircraft configuration is now available in less than 2 hours of elapsed time. Another way of looking at this performance is that it would take 117 Cray C90 supercomputers to match the performance of the code on the 512 CPU Origin 2000. Future Work The NASA Ames team is happy with the performance they were able to achieve with the Overflow code on the 512 CPU system. However, they believe that they may be able to speed the simulation by a factor of 2 with further optimation of the code. Reference This is an overview of NAS Technical Report 00-005.

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	NAS Technical Report 00-005 NASA Overflow SGI More on Solver Also by nwyman