Parallel Performance Studies for a Hyperbolic Test Problem

Abstract

The performance of parallel computer code depends on an intricate interplay of the processors, the architecture of the compute nodes, their interconnect network, the numerical algorithm, and the scheduling policy used. This note considers a case study of a solver of a system of transient hyperbolic conservation laws which utilizes both point-to-point and collective communications between parallel processes at each time step. The solver is already known to scale well to many parallel processes on distributed-memory clusters with a high performance interconnect network. The results presented here show excellent overall performance of the new cluster hpc with InfiniBand interconnect and confirm that is beneficial to use the maximum number of cores possible on every node, allowing a total of 128 parallel processes on the 32 compute nodes.