Workload Characterization of CFD Applications Using Partial Differential Equation Solvers
Abdul Waheed, Jerry C. Yan, Subhash Saini · 1998
Workload characterization is used for modeling and evaluating computing systems at different levels of detail. We present workload characterization for a class of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications that solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). This workload characterization focuses on three high performance computing platforms: SGI Origin2000, IBM SP-2, and a cluster of Intel Pentium Pro based PCs. We execute extensive measurement-based experiments on these platforms to gather statistics of system resource usage, which lead to a quantitative workload characterization. Our workload characterization approach yields a coarse-grain resource utilization behavior that is being applied for performance modeling and evaluation of distributed high performance metacomputing systems. In addition, this study enhances our understanding of interactions between PDE solver workloads and high performance computing platforms and is useful for tuning applications belonging to this class. 1