Evaluation of message passing communication patterns in finite element solution of coupled problems

Abstract

This work presents a performance evaluation of single node and subdomain communication schemes available in EdgeCFD, an implicit edge-based coupled fluid flow and transport code for solving large scale problems in modern clusters. A natural convection flow problem is considered to assess performance metrics. Tests, focused in single node multi-core performance, show that past Intel Xeon processors dramatically suffer when large workloads are imposed to a single node. However, the problem seems to be mitigated in the newest Intel Xeon processor. We also observe that MPI non-blocking point-to-point interface sub-domain communications, although more difficult to implement, are more effective than collective interface sub-domain communications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.