Experience in parallel computational mechanics on marenostrum

Abstract

We present in this paper the experience of the authors in solving very large problems of computational mechanics on a supercomputer. The authors are researchers of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), a brand new research center in Spain, which hosts the fastest supercomputer in Europe and the fifth in the world: MareNostrum (TOP500, November 2006). A brief presentation of MareNostrum is given in the first section. In the next section, we describe the physical problems we are faced with, followed by the section on the associated numerical strategies. Next section presents the parallelization strategy employed; emphasis will be put on the important aspects to obtain good speed-up results on thousands of processors. We follow the discussion by describing some applications together with speed-up results. We finalize the paper by describing the performance tool used at BSC-CNS and their application in computational mechanics. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.