Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
From Physical Modeling to Scientific Understanding
- An End-to-End Approach to Parallel Supercomputing
Tiankai Tu, Hongfeng Yu, Leonardo Ramirez-Guzman
Jacobo Bielak, Omar Ghattas, Kwan-Liu Ma, David R. O'Hallaron
January 2006
CMU-CS-06-105.ps
CMU-CS-06-105.pdf
Conventional parallel scientific computing uses files as interface
between simulation components such as meshing, partitioning, solving
and visualizing. This approach results in time-consuming file transfers,
disk I/O and data format conversions that consume large amounts of
network, storage, and computing resources while contributing nothing
to applications. We propose an end-to-end approach to parallel
supercomputing. The key idea is to replace the cumbersome file
interface with a scalable, parallel, runtime data structure, on top
of which all simulation components are constructed in a tightly coupled
way. We have implemented this new methodology within an octree-based
finite element simulation system named Hercules. The only input to
Hercules is material property descriptions of a problem domain;
the only outputs are lightweight jpegformated images generated as
they are simulated at every visualization time step. There is
absolutely no other intermediary file I/O. Performance evaluation
of Hercules on up to 2048 processors on the AlphaServer system at
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has shown good isogranular
scalability and fixed-size scalability.
27 pages
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