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Title: A performance model for the communication in fast multipole methods on high-performance computing platforms

Journal Article · · International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
 [1];  [1];  [1]
  1. Division of Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
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Exascale systems are predicted to have approximately 1 billion cores, assuming gigahertz cores. Limitations on affordable network topologies for distributed memory systems of such massive scale bring new challenges to the currently dominant parallel programing model. Currently, there are many efforts to evaluate the hardware and software bottlenecks of exascale designs. It is therefore of interest to model application performance and to understand what changes need to be made to ensure extrapolated scalability. The fast multipole method (FMM) was originally developed for accelerating N-body problems in astrophysics and molecular dynamics but has recently been extended to a wider range of problems. Its high arithmetic intensity combined with its linear complexity and asynchronous communication patterns make it a promising algorithm for exascale systems. In this paper, we discuss the challenges for FMM on current parallel computers and future exascale architectures, with a focus on internode communication. We focus on the communication part only; the efficiency of the computational kernels are beyond the scope of the present study. We develop a performance model that considers the communication patterns of the FMM and observe a good match between our model and the actual communication time on four high-performance computing (HPC) systems, when latency, bandwidth, network topology, and multicore penalties are all taken into account. To our knowledge, this is the first formal characterization of internode communication in FMM that validates the model against actual measurements of communication time. The ultimate communication model is predictive in an absolute sense; however, on complex systems, this objective is often out of reach or of a difficulty out of proportion to its benefit when there exists a simpler model that is inexpensive and sufficient to guide coding decisions leading to improved scaling. The current model provides such guidance.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF); Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States); UT-Battelle LLC/ORNL, Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357; AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1565623
Journal Information:
International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Vol. 30, Issue 4; ISSN 1094-3420
Publisher:
SAGE
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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