CACHE OPTIMIZATION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A STRUCTURED CFD CODE - GHOST

• Main Author: Palki, Anand B.
• Format: Others
• Published: UKnowledge 2006
• Subjects: Cache Optimization|External blocking|Internal blocking|Structured CFD Code Optimization|Commodity Clusters
• Online Access: http://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_theses/363; http://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1366&context=gradschool_theses

This research focuses on evaluating and enhancing the performance of an in-house, structured, 2D CFD code - GHOST, on modern commodity clusters. The basic philosophy of this work is to optimize the cache performance of the code by splitting up the grid into smaller blocks and carrying out the required calculations on these smaller blocks. This in turn leads to enhanced code performance on commodity clusters. Accordingly, this work presents a discussion along with a detailed description of two techniques: external and internal blocking, for data access optimization. These techniques have been tested on steady, unsteady, laminar, and turbulent test cases and the results are presented. The critical hardware parameters which influenced the code performance were identified. A detailed study investigating the effect of these parameters on the code performance was conducted and the results are presented. The modified version of the code was also ported to the current state-of-art architectures with successful results.