A massively space-time parallel N-body solver

R. Speck, D. Ruprecht, R. Krause, M. Emmett, M. Minion, M. Winkel, P. Gibbon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

45 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present a novel space-time parallel version of the Barnes-Hut tree code PEPC using PFASST, the Parallel Full Approximation Scheme in Space and Time. The naive use of increasingly more processors for a fixed-size N-body problem is prone to saturate as soon as the number of unknowns per core becomes too small. To overcome this intrinsic strong-scaling limit, we introduce temporal parallelism on top of PEPC's existing hybrid MPI/PThreads spatial decomposition. Here, we use PFASST which is based on a combination of the iterations of the parallel-in-time algorithm parareal with the sweeps of spectral deferred correction (SDC) schemes. By combining these sweeps with multiple space-time discretization levels, PFASST relaxes the theoretical bound on parallel efficiency in parareal. We present results from runs on up to 262,144 cores on the IBM Blue Gene/P installation JUGENE, demonstrating that the spacetime parallel code provides speedup beyond the saturation of the purely space-parallel approach.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2012 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC 2012
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event2012 24th International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC 2012 - Salt Lake City, UT, United States
Duration: Nov 10 2012Nov 16 2012

Publication series

NameInternational Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC
ISSN (Print)2167-4329
ISSN (Electronic)2167-4337

Other

Other2012 24th International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySalt Lake City, UT
Period11/10/1211/16/12

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software

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