Parallel performance of two applications in the Boeing high performance computing benchmark suite

Abstract We describe our work to evaluate the performance of the parallel versions of two floating-point-intensive engineering applications from Boeing's high performance computing benchmark suite (BHPCBS) on emerging RISC parallel systems and PC clusters. The first application is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, OVERFLOW, developed by NASA and used by Boeing for analysis and design of advanced aircraft. The second application is a prototype of a computational electromagnetics (CEM) code, developed by Boeing and used for radar cross-section studies. The distributed memory parallel versions of both applications use the message passing interface (MPI) standard for message passing. The goal of our work was to determine whether RISC parallel systems and PC clusters, which offer high performance at low cost, may be able to meet Boeing's computing requirements in the future. We describe the test environments for the studies, discuss parallelization issues and strategies and present performance data for the two applications.

[1]  B. Dembart,et al.  The accuracy of fast multipole methods for Maxwell's equations , 1998 .

[2]  R. Coifman,et al.  The fast multipole method for the wave equation: a pedestrian prescription , 1993, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine.

[3]  Maurice Yarrow,et al.  Improved Multi-Partition Method for Line-Based Iteration Schemes , 1994 .

[4]  Sisira Weeratunga,et al.  Parallel computation of 3-D Navier-Stokes flowfields for supersonic vehicles , 1993 .

[5]  P. Spalart.  A One-Equation Turbulence Model for Aerodynamic Flows , 1992 .

[6]  Christopher A. Atwood,et al.  Nonlinear Fluid Computations in a Distributed Environment , 1995 .

[7]  V. Rokhlin.  Diagonal Forms of Translation Operators for the Helmholtz Equation in Three Dimensions , 1993 .

[8]  David Levine,et al.  Performance Testing of a Parallel Multiblock CFD Solver , 2001, Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl..

[9]  Message P Forum,et al.  MPI: A Message-Passing Interface Standard , 1994 .

[10]  Mario Lauria,et al.  MPI-FM: High Performance MPI on Workstation Clusters , 1997, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[11]  Thomas H. Pulliam,et al.  Recent enhancements to OVERFLOW , 1997 .

[12]  Thomas H. Pulliam,et al.  On implicit finite-difference simulations of three-dimensional flow , 1978 .

[13]  Chansup Byun,et al.  A multi-level parallelization concept for high-fidelity multi-block solvers , 1997, ACM/IEEE SC 1997 Conference (SC'97).

[14]  Michael A. Epton,et al.  Multipole Translation Theory for the Three-Dimensional Laplace and Helmholtz Equations , 1995, SIAM J. Sci. Comput..

[15]  T. Pulliam,et al.  A diagonal form of an implicit approximate-factorization algorithm , 1981 .