Runtime mechanisms to survive new HPC architectures: A use case in human respiratory simulations. (January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Garcia-Gasulla, Marta; Mantovani, Filippo; Josep-Fabrego, Marc; Eguzkitza, Beatriz; Houzeaux, Guillaume
• Other Names: Cecilia José M guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance computing applications. Volume 34:Number 1(2020)
• Page Start: 42
• Page End: 56
• Publication Date: 2020-01
• Subjects: Computational fluid and particle dynamics -- runtime -- load balancing -- iterators -- architecture comparison; High performance computing -- Periodicals; Supercomputers -- Periodicals; 004.1105
• DOI: 10.1177/1094342019842919
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1094-3420

Abstract

Computational fluid and particle dynamics (CFPD) simulations are of paramount importance for studying and improving drug effectiveness. Computational requirements of CFPD codes demand high-performance computing (HPC) resources. For these reasons, we introduce and evaluate in this article system software techniques for improving performance and tolerating load imbalance on a state-of-the-art production CFPD code. We demonstrate benefits of these techniques on Intel-, IBM- and Arm-based HPC technologies ranked in the Top500 supercomputers, showing the importance of using mechanisms applied at runtime to improve the performance independently of the underlying architecture. We run a real CFPD simulation of particle tracking on the human respiratory system, showing performance improvements of up to 2×, across different architectures, while applying runtime techniques and keeping constant the computational resources.