MC² 001: Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics Optimization

Posted on February 11, 2017 in MC² Series, Training

Interested in this webinar? See more webinars like this.

Speaker

Dr. Fabio Baruffa, Sr. HPC Application Specialist
Leibniz Supercomputing Centre

Since 2016, Dr. Fabio Baruffa is Senior HPC Application Specialist at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich. He is a member of the Intel Parallel Computing Center (IPCC) at LRZ, focusing on code modernization and porting of scientific applications. Prior to LRZ, he has worked as HPC researcher at Max-Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF), Jülich Research Center and Cineca Supercomputing involved in HPC software development and analysis of scientific codes. His main research interests are in the area of computational methods and optimizations for HPC systems. He holds a PhD in Physics from University of Regensburg for his research in the area of spintronics device and quantum computing.

Presentation

Performance Optimization of SPH Algorithms for Multi/Many-Core Architectures

In the framework of the Intel Parallel Computing Centre at the Research Campus Garching in Munich, our group at LRZ presents recent results on performance optimization of Gadget-3, a widely used community code for computational astrophysics. We identify and isolate a sample code kernel, which is representative of a typical Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) algorithm and focus on threading parallelism optimization, change of the data layout into Structure of Arrays (SoA), compiler auto-vectorization and algorithmic improvements in the particle sorting. We measure lower execution time and improved threading scalability both on Intel Xeon (2.6× on Ivy Bridge) and Xeon Phi (13.7× on Knights Corner) systems. First tests on second generation Xeon Phi (Knights Landing) demonstrate the portability of the devised optimization solutions to upcoming architectures.

Links: IPCC, arXiv:1612.06090