Renumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machines

The performance of unstructured grid codes on workstations and distributed memory parallel computers is substantially affected by the efficiency of the memory hierarchy. This efficiency essentially depends on the order of computation and numbering of the grid. Most grid generators do not take into a...

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Main Authors: Burgess, D, Giles, M
Format: Journal article
Published: 1997
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author Burgess, D
Giles, M
author_facet Burgess, D
Giles, M
author_sort Burgess, D
collection OXFORD
description The performance of unstructured grid codes on workstations and distributed memory parallel computers is substantially affected by the efficiency of the memory hierarchy. This efficiency essentially depends on the order of computation and numbering of the grid. Most grid generators do not take into account the effect of the memory hierarchy when producing grids so application programmers must renumber grids to improve the performance of their codes. To design a good renumbering scheme a detailed runtime analysis of the data movement in an application code is needed. Thus, a memory hierarchy simulator has been developed to analyse the effect of existing renumbering schemes such as bandwidth reduction, the Greedy method, colouring, random numbering and the original numbering produced by the grid generator. The renumbering is applied to either vertices, edges, faces or cells and two algorithms are proposed to consistently renumber the other entities used in the solver. The simulated and actual timings show that bandwidth reduction and Greedy methods give the best performance on IBM RS/6000, SGI Indy, SGI Indigo and SGI Power Challenge machines for three-dimensional Poissons's, Maxwell's and the Euler equations solvers. The improvement in performance is over a factor of two for applications with large grids and a high ratio of memory-accesses to computation. This factor is even higher for memory hierarchies with small caches. © 1997 Elsevier Science Limited. All rights reserved.
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spelling oxford-uuid:a970fb62-fc97-404a-a98b-aba287b978332022-03-27T03:08:30ZRenumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machinesJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:a970fb62-fc97-404a-a98b-aba287b97833Symplectic Elements at Oxford1997Burgess, DGiles, MThe performance of unstructured grid codes on workstations and distributed memory parallel computers is substantially affected by the efficiency of the memory hierarchy. This efficiency essentially depends on the order of computation and numbering of the grid. Most grid generators do not take into account the effect of the memory hierarchy when producing grids so application programmers must renumber grids to improve the performance of their codes. To design a good renumbering scheme a detailed runtime analysis of the data movement in an application code is needed. Thus, a memory hierarchy simulator has been developed to analyse the effect of existing renumbering schemes such as bandwidth reduction, the Greedy method, colouring, random numbering and the original numbering produced by the grid generator. The renumbering is applied to either vertices, edges, faces or cells and two algorithms are proposed to consistently renumber the other entities used in the solver. The simulated and actual timings show that bandwidth reduction and Greedy methods give the best performance on IBM RS/6000, SGI Indy, SGI Indigo and SGI Power Challenge machines for three-dimensional Poissons's, Maxwell's and the Euler equations solvers. The improvement in performance is over a factor of two for applications with large grids and a high ratio of memory-accesses to computation. This factor is even higher for memory hierarchies with small caches. © 1997 Elsevier Science Limited. All rights reserved.
spellingShingle Burgess, D
Giles, M
Renumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machines
title Renumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machines
title_full Renumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machines
title_fullStr Renumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machines
title_full_unstemmed Renumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machines
title_short Renumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machines
title_sort renumbering unstructured grids to improve the performance of codes on hierarchical memory machines
work_keys_str_mv AT burgessd renumberingunstructuredgridstoimprovetheperformanceofcodesonhierarchicalmemorymachines
AT gilesm renumberingunstructuredgridstoimprovetheperformanceofcodesonhierarchicalmemorymachines