A Hybrid MPI / OpenMP Parallelisation of a Tax and Benefits Application
Steven Lamerton · 2013
This MSc project continues existing work to improve the performance of an economic model written and used by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Previous work allowed the use of OpenMP with up to thirty cores. In this report we detail the steps taken to port the code to HECToR, extend the existing OpenMP parallelisation to encompass an additional loop and to perform an OpenMP parallelisation of the simulation phase of the model. This additional work increases the potential parallelism from thirty to sixty cores. We also integrate the HOPSPACK optimisation package to give a hybrid MPI / OpenMP implementation of the code. This hybrid code improves the runtime from over eleven hours in the serial case to less than two minutes when running on twenty-eight nodes on HECToR, whilst decreasing the cost to run the model from £20.75 to £1.61.