Strong Scalability Studies for the 2-D Poisson Equation on the Taki 2021 Cluster with Historical Comparison

Abstract

The new 2021 nodes in the cluster taki in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility contain two 24core Intel Cascade Lake CPUs and 192 GB of memory per node, connected by an high-performance InfiniBand interconnect. Parallel performance studies for the memory-bound test problem of the Poisson equation in two spatial dimensions yield several conclusions: Strong scalability studies demonstrate excellent performance when using multiple nodes due to the low latency of the high-performance interconnect and good speedup when using all cores of the multi-core CPUs. For the largest numbers of processes per node, the runtime for the code is not significantly reduced, a typical behavior characteristic of memory-bound code. Comparisons to results on past clusters in HPCF bring out that core-per-core performance of serial code improvements has improved again, demonstrating the quality of the newest CPUs. Also node-per-node performance of parallel code continues to improve due to the larger number of cores available on a node. albeit we have fewer nodes in taki 2021 than we had in previous partitions.