An efficient approach to unstructured mesh hydrodynamics on the cell broadband engine
Charles R. Ferenbaugh · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2010
Unstructured mesh physics for the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) has received little or no attention to date, largely because the CBE architecture poses particular challenges for unstructured mesh algorithms. The most common SPU memory management strategies cannot be applied to the irregular memory access patterns of unstructured meshes, and the SPU vector instruction set does not support the indirect addressing needed by connectivity arrays. This paper presents an approach to unstructured mesh physics that addresses these challenges, by creating a new mesh data structure and reorganizing code to give efficient CBE performance. The approach is demonstrated on the FLAG production hydrodynamics code using standard test problems, and results show an average speedup of more than 5x over the original code.