Parallel Performance Studies for an Elliptic Test Problem on the 2018 Portion of the Taki Cluster

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Carlos Barajas and Matthias K. Gobbert, Parallel Performance Studies for an Elliptic Test Problem on the 2018 Portion of the Taki Cluster, http://hpcf-files.umbc.edu/research/papers/PoissonHPCF201818.pdf

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Abstract

The new 2018 nodes in the CPU cluster taki in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility contain two 18-core Intel Skylake CPUs and 384 GB of memory per node, connected by an EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) InfiniBand interconnect. The performance studies use the classical test problem of the Poisson equation in two spatial dimensions, discretized by the finite difference method to give a very large and sparse system of linear equations that is solved by the conjugate gradient method. The results demonstrate excellent scalability when using multiple nodes due to the low latency of the high-performance interconnect and good speedup when using all cores of the multi-core CPUs. Comparisons to results on the 2009 and 2013 nodes bring out that core-per-core performance of serial code improvements have stalled, but that node-per-node performance of parallel code continues to improve due to the larger number of cores available on a node. These observations compel the recommendations that (i) serial code should use the 2009 and 2013 nodes of taki and (ii) parallel code is needed to take full advantage of the 2018 nodes.