scholarly journals Porting the AVS/Express scientific visualization software to Cray XT4

Author(s):  
George W. Leaver ◽  
Martin J. Turner ◽  
James S. Perrin ◽  
Paul M. Mummery ◽  
Philip J. Withers

Remote scientific visualization, where rendering services are provided by larger scale systems than are available on the desktop, is becoming increasingly important as dataset sizes increase beyond the capabilities of desktop workstations. Uptake of such services relies on access to suitable visualization applications and the ability to view the resulting visualization in a convenient form. We consider five rules from the e-Science community to meet these goals with the porting of a commercial visualization package to a large-scale system. The application uses message-passing interface (MPI) to distribute data among data processing and rendering processes. The use of MPI in such an interactive application is not compatible with restrictions imposed by the Cray system being considered. We present details, and performance analysis, of a new MPI proxy method that allows the application to run within the Cray environment yet still support MPI communication required by the application. Example use cases from materials science are considered.

MRS Bulletin ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph E.H. Sims

AbstractSome forms of renewable energy have long contributed to electricity generation, whereas others are just emerging. For example, large-scale hydropower is a mature technology generating about 16% of global electricity, and many smaller scale systems are also being installed worldwide. Future opportunities to improve the technology are limited but include upgrading of existing plants to gain greater performance efficiencies and reduced maintenance. Geothermal energy, widely used for power generation and direct heat applications, is also mature, but new technologies could improve plant designs, extend their lifetimes, and improve reliability. By contrast, ocean energy is an emerging renewable energy technology. Design, development, and testing of a myriad of devices remain mainly in the research and development stage, with many opportunities for materials science to improve design and performance, reduce costly maintenance procedures, and extend plant operating lifetimes under the harsh marine environment.


Author(s):  
Alan Gray ◽  
Kevin Stratford

Leading high performance computing systems achieve their status through use of highly parallel devices such as NVIDIA graphics processing units or Intel Xeon Phi many-core CPUs. The concept of performance portability across such architectures, as well as traditional CPUs, is vital for the application programmer. In this paper we describe targetDP, a lightweight abstraction layer which allows grid-based applications to target data parallel hardware in a platform agnostic manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our pragmatic approach by presenting performance results for a complex fluid application (with which the model was co-designed), plus separate lattice quantum chromodynamics particle physics code. For each application, a single source code base is seen to achieve portable performance, as assessed within the context of the Roofline model. TargetDP can be combined with Message Passing Interface (MPI) to allow use on systems containing multiple nodes: we demonstrate this through provision of scaling results on traditional and graphics processing unit-accelerated large scale supercomputers.


Author(s):  
Anoosheh Niavarani-Kheirier ◽  
Masoud Darbandi ◽  
Gerry E. Schneider

The main objective of the current work is to utilize Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) for simulating buoyancy-driven flow considering the hybrid thermal lattice Boltzmann equation (HTLBE). After deriving the required formulations, they are validated against a wide range of Rayleigh numbers in buoyancy-driven square cavity problem. The performance of the method is investigated on parallel machines using Message Passing Interface (MPI) library and implementing domain decomposition technique to solve problems with large order of computations. The achieved results show that the code is highly efficient to solve large scale problems with excellent speedup.


Author(s):  
Yu-Cheng Chou ◽  
Harry H. Cheng

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized library specification designed for message-passing parallel programming on large-scale distributed systems. A number of MPI libraries have been implemented to allow users to develop portable programs using the scientific programming languages, Fortran, C and C++. Ch is an embeddable C/C++ interpreter that provides an interpretive environment for C/C++ based scripts and programs. Combining Ch with any MPI C/C++ library provides the functionality for rapid development of MPI C/C++ programs without compilation. In this article, the method of interfacing Ch scripts with MPI C implementations is introduced by using the MPICH2 C library as an example. The MPICH2-based Ch MPI package provides users with the ability to interpretively run MPI C program based on the MPICH2 C library. Running MPI programs through the MPICH2-based Ch MPI package across heterogeneous platforms consisting of Linux and Windows machines is illustrated. Comparisons for the bandwidth, latency, and parallel computation speedup between C MPI, Ch MPI, and MPI for Python in an Ethernet-based environment comprising identical Linux machines are presented. A Web-based example is given to demonstrate the use of Ch and MPICH2 in C based CGI scripting to facilitate the development of Web-based applications for parallel computing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Qian Yang ◽  
Bing Wei ◽  
Linqian Li ◽  
Debiao Ge

The plasma sheath is known as a popular topic of computational electromagnetics, and the plasma case is more resource-intensive than the non-plasma case. In this paper, a parallel shift-operator discontinuous Galerkin time-domain method using the MPI (Message Passing Interface) library is proposed to solve the large-scale plasma problems. To demonstrate our algorithm, a plasma sheath model of the high-speed blunt cone was established based on the results of the multiphysics software, and our algorithm was used to extract the radar cross-section (RCS) versus different incident angles of the model.


2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Volzer ◽  
Peter Eberhard

Abstract The use of elastic bodies within a multibody simulation became more and more important within the last years. To include the elastic bodies, described as a finite element model in multibody simulations, the dimension of the system of ordinary differential equations must be reduced by projection. For this purpose, in this work, the modal reduction method, a component mode synthesis based method and a moment-matching method are used. Due to the always increasing size of the non-reduced systems, the calculation of the projection matrix leads to a large demand of computational resources and cannot be done on usual serial computers with available memory. In this paper, the model reduction software Morembs++ is presented using a parallelization concept based on the message passing interface to satisfy the need of memory and reduce the runtime of the model reduction process. Additionally, the behaviour of the Block-Krylov-Schur eigensolver, implemented in the Anasazi package of the Trilinos project, is analysed with regard to the choice of the size of the Krylov base, the block size and the number of blocks. Besides, an iterative solver is considered within the CMS-based method.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 2369-2402
Author(s):  
W. He ◽  
C. Beyer ◽  
J. H. Fleckenstein ◽  
E. Jang ◽  
O. Kolditz ◽  
...  

Abstract. This technical paper presents an efficient and performance-oriented method to model reactive mass transport processes in environmental and geotechnical subsurface systems. The open source scientific software packages OpenGeoSys and IPhreeqc have been coupled, to combine their individual strengths and features to simulate thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical coupled processes in porous and fractured media with simultaneous consideration of aqueous geochemical reactions. Furthermore, a flexible parallelization scheme using MPI (Message Passing Interface) grouping techniques has been implemented, which allows an optimized allocation of computer resources for the node-wise calculation of chemical reactions on the one hand, and the underlying processes such as for groundwater flow or solute transport on the other hand. The coupling interface and parallelization scheme have been tested and verified in terms of precision and performance.


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