Chip‐level and multi‐node analysis of energy‐optimized lattice Boltzmann CFD simulations

Memory‐bound algorithms show complex performance and energy consumption behavior on multicore processors. We choose the lattice Boltzmann method on an Intel Sandy Bridge cluster as a prototype scenario to investigate if and how single‐chip performance and power characteristics can be generalized to the highly parallel case. First, we perform an analysis of a sparse‐lattice lattice Boltzmann method implementation for complex geometries. Using a single‐core performance model, we predict the intra‐chip saturation characteristics and the optimal operating point in terms of energy‐to‐solution as a function of implementation details, clock frequency, vectorization, and number of active cores per chip. We show that high single‐core performance and a correct choice of the number of active cores per chip are the essential optimizations for the lowest energy‐to‐solution at minimal performance degradation. Then we extrapolate to the Message Passing Interface (MPI)‐parallel level and quantify the energy‐saving potential of various optimizations and execution modes, where we find these guidelines to be even more important, especially when communication overhead is non‐negligible. In our setup, we could achieve energy savings of 35% in this case, compared with a naive approach. We also demonstrate that a simple non‐reflective reduction of the clock speed leaves most of the energy‐saving potential unused. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.