Influence of Locality on the Scalability of Method-and System-Parallel Explicit Peer Methods
Matthias Korch, Thomas Rauber, Matthias Stachowski, Tim Werner · Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems · 2016
Because the numerical solution of initial value problems (IVPs) of systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) can be computationally intensive, several parallel methods have been proposed in the past.One class of modern parallel IVP methods are the peer methods proposed by Schmitt and Weiner, some of which are publicly available in the software package EPPEER released in 2012.Since they possess eight independent stages, these methods offer natural parallelism across the method suitable for the typical numbers of CPU cores in modern multicore workstations.EPPEER is written in FORTRAN95 and uses OpenMP as parallel programming model.In this paper, we investigate the influence of the locality of memory references on the scalability of method-and systemparallel explicit peer methods.In particular, we investigate the interplay between the linear combination of the stages and the function evaluations by applying different program transformations to the loop structure and by evaluating their performance in detailed runtime experiments.These experiments point out that loop tiling is required to improve cache utilization while still allowing the compiler to vectorize along the system dimension.To show that for certain classes of right-hand-side functions a stage-parallel execution is not optimal, and to enhance the scalability of the peer methods to core numbers larger than the number of stages of a method, system-parallel implementations have been derived.Runtime experiments show that there are IVPs for which these new implementations outperform stage-parallel implementations on numbers of cores less than or equal to the number of stages.Moreover, by exploiting the ability to utilize higher core numbers, higher speedups than the number of stages have been reached.