Strong and Weak Scaling of the Sierra/SD Eigenvector Problem to a Billion Degrees of Freedom

Technical Report · Tue Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1494162· OSTI ID:1494162

Bunting, Gregory B. ^[1]

---

1. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

Sierra/SD is a structural dynamics finite element software package that is known for its scalability and performance on DOE supercomputers. While there are historical documents demonstrating weak and strong scaling on DOE systems such as Redsky, no such formal studies have been done on modern architectures. This report demonstrates that Sierra/SD still scales on modern architectures. Non structured meshes in the shape of an I-Beam are solved in sizes ranging from fifty thousand degrees of freedom in serial up to one and a half billion degrees of freedom on over eighteen thousand processors using only default solver options. The report serves as a baseline for users to estimate computation cost of finite element analyses in Sierra/SD, understand how solver options relate to computational costs, and pick optimal processor counts to solve a given problem size, as well as a baseline for evaluating computational cost and scalability on next generation architectures.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1494162
• Report Number(s): SAND--2019-1217; 672151
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING