Publications Details
The development and performance of a message-passing version of the PAGOSA shock-wave physics code
A message-passing version of the PAGOSA shock-wave physics code has been developed at Sandia National Laboratories for multiple-instruction, multiple-data stream (MIMD) computers. PAGOSA is an explicit, Eulerian code for modeling the three-dimensional, high-speed hydrodynamic flow of fluids and the dynamic deformation of solids under high rates of strain. It was originally developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) Connection Machine parallel computers. The performance of Sandia`s message-passing version of PAGOSA has been measured on two MIMD machines, the nCUBE 2 and the Intel Paragon XP/S. No special efforts were made to optimize the code for either machine. The measured scaled speedup (computational time for a single computational node divided by the computational time per node for fixed computational load) and grind time (computational time per cell per time step) show that the MIMD PAGOSA code scales linearly with the number of computational nodes used on a variety of problems, including the simulation of shaped-charge jets perforating an oil well casing. Scaled parallel efficiencies for MIMD PAGOSA are greater than 0.70 when the available memory per node is filled (or nearly filled) on hundreds to a thousand or more computational nodes on these two machines, indicating that the code scales very well. Thus good parallel performance can be achieved for complex and realistic applications when they are first implemented on MIMD parallel computers.