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Porting to Cell/B.E. the Alya System, a High Performance Computational Mechanics Code
Abstract
The Alya System is a High Performance Computational Mechanics (HPCM) application, specifically designed to run efficiently in large scale supercomputing facilities. High amount of resources are required by this kind of applications, thus optimize at all level is important. New energy efficient heterogeneous multicore chips, like the Cell/B.E., provide novel ways to speedup scientific codes. In this work we present the porting of Alya System, to the Cell/B.E. Different porting strategies are discussed for the tasks involved in the elemental loop, which is the most computational segment of the systems along with the solver. We focus in the most difficult issue to tackle, the gather/scatter data management tasks. Two are the proposed strategies, called PPE-driven and SPE-driven. Our first results in Cell/B.E. architecture with the PPE-driven strategy show a speed-up of 2.7x compared with the PPC970MP processor. Also, preliminary SPE-driven implementation results are presented.