On the trade-offs between energy to solution and runtime for real-world CFD test-cases
Michael Bareford, Nick P. Johnson, Michèle Weiland · 2016
This paper provides an insight into the optimisation of runtime and energy performance for two widely-used CFD codes. Energy efficiency is a hot-topic in HPC and methods to reduce the energy consumption of large machines are an active area of research. In this paper, we examine the energy efficiency and runtime performance of the SBLI and Nektar++ codes, using small but real-world test cases. The codes are instrumented in sufficient detail to reveal significant variability in energy usage during the course of the simulations. In addition, the test cases are run at different CPU frequencies and the consequences of changing this parameter, for both runtime performance (time to solution) and power performance (energy to solution) are presented.