Measuring and comparing the scaling behaviour of a high-performance CFD code on different supercomputing infrastructures

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the scalability of a high-performance CFD code on large supercomputers, analyzing performance bottlenecks and demonstrating its effectiveness for complex engineering simulations at massive scales.

Contribution

It presents a detailed scalability analysis of an in-house CFD code on supercomputers up to 140,000 processes, highlighting performance characteristics for large-scale engineering problems.

Findings

Scalability up to 140,000 processes demonstrated

Identification of bottlenecks in communication and computation

Effective simulation of problems with hundreds of billions of degrees of freedom

Abstract

Parallel code design is a challenging task especially when addressing petascale systems for massive parallel processing (MPP), i.e. parallel computations on several hundreds of thousands of cores. An in-house computational fluid dynamics code, developed by our group, was designed for such high-fidelity runs in order to exhibit excellent scalability values. Basis for this code is an adaptive hierarchical data structure together with an efficient communication and (numerical) computation scheme that supports MPP. For a detailled scalability analysis, we performed several experiments on two of Germany's national supercomputers up to 140,000 processes. In this paper, we will show the results of those experiments and discuss any bottlenecks that could be observed while solving engineering-based problems such as porous media flows or thermal comfort assessments for problem sizes up to several hundred billion degrees of freedom.