Prospects for CFD on Petaflops Systems

With tetraflops-scale computational modeling expected to be routine by 2003-04, under the terms of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCT) of the U.S. Department of Energy, and with teraflops-capable platforms already available to a small group of users, attention naturally focuses on...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Keyes, David E, Kaushik, Dinesh K, Smith, Barry F
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
ALGORITHMS
COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS
Computer Programming and Software
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
CONCURRENT ENGINEERING
DATA BASES
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
FLOATING POINT OPERATION
Fluid Mechanics
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
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Summary:With tetraflops-scale computational modeling expected to be routine by 2003-04, under the terms of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCT) of the U.S. Department of Energy, and with teraflops-capable platforms already available to a small group of users, attention naturally focuses on the next symbolically important milestone, computing at rates of 10 to the 15th power floating point operations per second, or "petaflop/s". For architectural designs that are in any sense extrapolations of today's, petaflops-scale computing will require approximately one-million-fold instruction-level concurrency. Given that cost-effective one thousand-fold concurrency is challenging in practical computational fluid dynamics simulations today, algorithms are among the many possible bottlenecks to CFD on petaflops systems. After a general outline of the problems and prospects of petaflops computing, we examine the issue of algorithms for PDE computations in particular, a back-of-the-envelope parallel complexity analysis focuses on the latency of global synchronization steps in the implicit algorithm. We argue that the latency of synchronization steps is a fundamental, but addressable, challenge for PDE computations with static data structures, which are primarily determined by grids. We provide recent results with encouraging scalability for parallel implicit Euler simulations using the Newton-Krylov-Schwarz solver in the PETSc software library. The prospects for PDE simulations with dynamically evolving data structures are far less clear. Prepared in collaboration with Old Dominion Univ., Computer Science Dept., VA and Argonne National Lab., Mathematics and Computer Science Div., IL.