Measuring and comparing the scaling behaviour of a high-performance CFD code on different supercomputing infrastructures

Abstract: Parallel code design is a challenging task especially when addressing petascale systems for massive parallel processing (MPP), i.e. parallel computations on several hundreds of thousands of cores. An in-house computational fluid dynamics code, developed by our group, was designed for such high-fidelity runs in order to exhibit excellent scalability values. Basis for this code is an adaptive hierarchical data structure together with an efficient communication and (numerical) computation scheme that supports MPP. For a detailled scalability analysis, we performed several experiments on two of Germany's national supercomputers up to 140,000 processes. In this paper, we will show the results of those experiments and discuss any bottlenecks that could be observed while solving engineering-based problems such as porous media flows or thermal comfort assessments for problem sizes up to several hundred billion degrees of freedom.