Scaling of a Fast Fourier Transform and a pseudo-spectral fluid solver up to 196608 cores

• Published in: Journal of parallel and distributed computing Vol. 113; pp. 77 - 91
• Main Authors: Chatterjee, Anando G., Verma, Mahendra K., Kumar, Abhishek, Samtaney, Ravi, Hadri, Bilel, Khurram, Rooh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.03.2018
• Subjects: Extreme-resolution turbulence simulation; Fast Fourier transform; Pseudospectral method; Turbulence simulation; Extreme-resolution turbulence simulation; Pseudospectral method; Turbulence simulation; Fast Fourier transform
• ISSN: 0743-7315; 1096-0848
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpdc.2017.10.014

In this paper we present scaling results of a FFT library, FFTK, and a pseudospectral code, Tarang, on grid resolutions up to 81923 grid using 65536 cores of Blue Gene/P and 196608 cores of Cray XC40 supercomputers. We observe that communication dominates computation, more so on the Cray XC40. The computation time scales as Tcomp∼p−1, and the communication time as Tcomm∼n−γ2 with γ2 ranging from 0.7 to 0.9 for Blue Gene/P, and from 0.43 to 0.73 for Cray XC40. FFTK, and the fluid and convection solvers of Tarang exhibit weak as well as strong scaling nearly up to 196608 cores of Cray XC40. We perform a comparative study of the performance on the Blue Gene/P and Cray XC40 clusters. •Scalability of Fast Fourier Transform on maximum of 196608 cores.•Implementation and scaling of a scalable pseudo-spectral code Tarang.•Comparative performance study of FFT and Tarang on Blue Gene/P and Cray XC40.•Deduce Kolmogorov-like spectrum for Rayleigh–Bénard convection using simulation.