Scaling of a Fast Fourier Transform and a Pseudo-spectral Fluid Solver up to 196608 cores

Abstract

In this paper we present scaling results of a FFT library, FFTK, and a pseudospectral code, Tarang, on grid resolutions up to $8192^3$ grid using 65536 cores of Blue Gene/P and 196608 cores of Cray XC40 supercomputers. We observe that communication dominates computation, more so on the Cray XC40. The computation time scales as $T_\mathrm{comp} \sim p^{-1}$, and the communication time as $T_\mathrm{comm} \sim n^{-\gamma_2}$ with $\gamma_2$ ranging from 0.7 to 0.9 for Blue Gene/P, and from 0.43 to 0.73 for Cray XC40. FFTK, and the fluid and convection solvers of Tarang exhibit weak as well as strong scaling nearly up to 196608 cores of Cray XC40. We perform a comparative study of the performance on the Blue Gene/P and Cray XC40 clusters.