Streamline integration using mpi-hybrid parallelism on a large multicore architecture

David Camp, Christoph Garth, Hank Childs, David Pugmire, Kenneth Joy

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

55 Scopus citations

Abstract

Streamline computation in a very large vector field data set represents a significant challenge due to the nonlocal and data-dependent nature of streamline integration. In this paper, we conduct a study of the performance characteristics of hybrid parallel programming and execution as applied to streamline integration on a large, multicore platform. With multicore processors now prevalent in clusters and supercomputers, there is a need to understand the impact of these hybrid systems in order to make the best implementation choice. We use two MPI-based distribution approaches based on established parallelization paradigms, parallelize over seeds and parallelize over blocks, and present a novel MPI-hybrid algorithm for each approach to compute streamlines. Our findings indicate that the work sharing between cores in the proposed MPI-hybrid parallel implementation results in much improved performance and consumes less communication and I/O bandwidth than a traditional, nonhybrid distributed implementation.

Original languageEnglish
Article number5669297
Pages (from-to)1702-1713
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume17
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011

Funding

This work was supported by the Director, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 through the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program’s Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET). This work was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under contract IIS-0916289. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), which is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Keywords

  • Concurrent programming
  • Display algorithms
  • modes of computation
  • parallel programming
  • parallelism and concurrency
  • picture/image generation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Streamline integration using mpi-hybrid parallelism on a large multicore architecture'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this