Temporal Load Imbalance on Ondes3D Seismic Simulator for Different Multicore Architectures

TL;DR

This study evaluates how different multicore architectures affect load imbalance in Ondes3D seismic simulations, revealing architecture-dependent variations in temporal load distribution and kernel performance.

Contribution

It is the first comprehensive analysis of Ondes3D's performance across diverse multicore architectures, highlighting architecture-specific load imbalance issues.

Findings

Temporal load imbalance varies significantly across architectures.

Some platforms better mitigate load imbalance.

Kernel execution performance differs by architecture.

Abstract

The variety of today's multicore architectures motivates researchers to explore parallel scientific applications on different platforms. Load imbalance is one performance issue that can prejudice parallel applications from exploiting the computational power of these platforms. Ondes3D is a scientific application for seismic wave simulation used to assess the geological impact of earthquakes. Its parallelism relies on applying a regular domain decomposition in the geological domain provided and distributing each sub-domain to MPI ranks. Previous works investigate the significant spatial and temporal imbalance in Ondes3D and suggest new parallelization and load balancing techniques to minimize them. However, none explored its execution on different architectures. Our paper evaluates the performance of Ondes3D for two earthquake scenarios on eight different multicore architectures, including Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. We measure the load distribution per MPI rank, evaluate the temporal load imbalance, and compare the execution of the application's kernels. Our results show that the temporal load imbalance in Ondes3D depends on the architecture chosen, with some platforms minimizing such imbalance more effectively.