A communications simulation methodology for AMR codes using task dependency analysis
Cy P. Chan, Joseph P. Kenny, Gilbert Hendry, Vincent E. Beckner, John B. Bell, John M. Shalf · 2013
The ability to predict the performance of irregular, asynchronous applications on future hardware is essential to the exascale co-design process. Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) applications are inherently irregular and dynamic in their computation and communication patterns, resulting in complex hardware/software interactions. We have developed a methodology to use architectural simulators to assess the performance of different AMR data placement strategies on a selection of potential hardware interconnect topologies for exascale-class supercomputers. We use our framework to study the CASTRO AMR compressible astrophysics code for the simulation of supernovae. The results show a performance improvement of up to 18 percent may be obtained through the use of locality-aware data distributions for some network topologies on an exascale-class supercomputer.