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Scientific Programming
Volume 11 (2003), Issue 2, Pages 159-176
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2003/691573

A Performance-Prediction Model for PIC Applications on Clusters of Symmetric MultiProcessors: Validation with Hierarchical HPF+OpenMP Implementation

Sergio Briguglio,1 Beniamino Di Martino,2 and Gregorio Vlad1

1Associazione EURATOM-ENEA sulla Fusione, C.R. Frascati, C.P. 65, 00044, Frascati, Rome, Italy
2Dip. Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Second University of Naples, Italy

Received 16 July 2002; Accepted 16 July 2002

Copyright © 2003 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A performance-prediction model is presented, which describes different hierarchical workload decomposition strategies for particle in cell (PIC) codes on Clusters of Symmetric MultiProcessors. The devised workload decomposition is hierarchically structured: a higher-level decomposition among the computational nodes, and a lower-level one among the processors of each computational node. Several decomposition strategies are evaluated by means of the prediction model, with respect to the memory occupancy, the parallelization efficiency and the required programming effort. Such strategies have been implemented by integrating the high-level languages High Performance Fortran (at the inter-node stage) and OpenMP (at the intra-node one). The details of these implementations are presented, and the experimental values of parallelization efficiency are compared with the predicted results.