Comparison of Parallel Performance between MVAPICH2 and OpenMPI Applied to a Hyperbolic Test Problem

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Abstract

During the manufacture of integrated circuits, the process of atomic layer deposition (ALD) is used to deposit a uniform seed layer of solid material atop the surface of a silicon wafer. The process can be modeled on the molecular level by a system of transient, linear integro-partial di erential Boltzmann equations, coupled with a non-linear surface reaction model, together called the kinetic transport and reaction model (KTRM). Each Boltzmann equation can be approximated by discretizing the velocity space, which yields a system of transient hyperbolic conservation laws that only involve the position vector and time as independent variables. The system can then be solved with DG, a computer implementation of the discontinuous Galerkin method. Due to the large size of the systems being solved and large number of time steps required, it is necessary to use parallel computing to obtain a solution in a reasonable amount of time. We analyze the performance of the DG code on multiple mesh resolutions by measuring its speedup and e ciency on UMBC's new distributed-memory cluster, hpc (www.umbc.edu/hpcf). We also compare the performance of DG when it is compiled using the MVAPICH2 and OpenMPI implementations of MPI, the most prevalent parallel communication library today. Testing on a variety of mesh sizes shows that the MVAPICH2 implementation runs as fast or faster than OpenMPI in all cases. This senior thesis is part of undergraduate research conducted under the direction of Dr. Matthias K. Gobbert.