On efficiency of supercomputers in CFD simulations

Abstract

The present work is reporting the experience on different aspects of using supercomputers for CFD applications. Several problems that appear with new supercomputers built of multi-core nodes are considered. In particular, it is a problem of increased influence of irregular memory access, problems with efficient use of such a big numbers of processors that are available in present time. A hybrid parallelization using MPI and OpenMP technologies is also considered to improve efficiency of computations. Results of performance tests where the hybrid approach outperformed the MPI-only parallelization are shown. Finally, a performance comparison of Marenostrum and MVS-50000 supercomputers is presented, illustrative numerical results on the DNS of turbulent flows are also included. © 2010 Springer.