Many-core acceleration of a discrete ordinates transport mini-app at extreme scale

Deakin, Tom and McIntosh-Smith, Simon and Gaudin, Wayne

International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), 2016

Abstract

Time-dependent deterministic discrete ordinates transport codes are an important class of application which provide significant challenges for large, many-core systems. One such challenge is the large memory capacity needed by the solve step, which requires us to have a scalable solution in order to have enough node-level memory to store all the data. In our previous work, we demonstrated the first implementation which showed a significant performance benefit for single node solves using GPUs. In this paper we extend our work to large problems and demonstrate the scalability of our solution on two Petascale GPU-based supercomputers: Titan at Oak Ridge and Piz Daint at CSCS. Our results show that our improved node-level parallelism scheme scales just as well across large systems as previous approaches when using the tried and tested KBA domain decomposition technique. We validate our results against an improved performance model which predicts the runtime of the main ’sweep’ routine when running on different hardware, including CPUs or GPUs.

@inproceedings{isc16,
  author = {Deakin, Tom and McIntosh-Smith, Simon and Gaudin, Wayne},
  title = {{Many-core acceleration of a discrete ordinates transport mini-app at extreme scale}},
  booktitle = {{International Supercomputing Conference (ISC)}},
  year = {2016},
  publisher = {{Springer, Cham}},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-41321-1_22},
  keywords = {Conferences and Workshops}
}