A Case Study on Using a Proto-Application as a Proxy for Code Modernization

Abstract To take full advantage of future HPC systems, hybrid parallelization strategies are required. In a previous work, we demonstrated the Divide and Conquer, D&C, approach for efficient parallelization of finite element methods on unstructured meshes. In this paper we experiment the concept of proto-application as a proxy between computer scientists and application de- velopers on a real industrial use-case. The D&C library has been entirely developed on the proto-application and then validated on the original application. We also ported the D&C library to another fluid dynamic application, AETHER, developed by Dassault Aviation. The results show that the speed-up validated on the proto-application can be reproduced on other full scale applications using similar computational patterns.