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Persistent Octrees for Parallel Mesh Refinement Through Non-Volatile Byte-Addressable Memory

Journal Article · · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [1]
  1. Washington State Univ., Vancouver, WA (United States)
  2. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

We report that octree-based mesh adaptation has enabled simulations of complex physical phenomena. Existing meshing algorithms were proposed with the assumption that computer memory is volatile. Consequently, for failure recovery, the in-core algorithms need to save memory states as snapshots with slow file I/Os. The out-of-core algorithms store octants on disks for persistence. However, neither of them was designed to leverage unique characteristics of non-volatile byte-addressable memory (NVBM). In this paper, we propose a novel data structure Distributed Persistent Merged octree (DPM-octree) for both meshing and in-memory storage of persistent octrees using NVBM. It is a multi-version data structure and can recover from failures using its earlier persistent version stored in NVBM. In addition, we design a feature-directed sampling approach to help dynamically transform the DPM-octree layout for reducing NVBM-induced memory write latency. DPM-octree uses parity trees which are created using erasure coding and stored in NVBM to support low-latency in-memory octant recovery after data loss. DPM-octree has been successfully integrated with Gerris software for simulation of fluid dynamics. Finally, our experimental results with real-world scientific workloads show that DPM-octree scales up to 1.1 billion mesh elements with 1000 processors on the Titan supercomputer.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396
OSTI ID:
1469556
Report Number(s):
LA-UR--18-23313
Journal Information:
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems Journal Issue: 3 Vol. 30; ISSN 1045-9219
Publisher:
IEEECopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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