Co-design of a particle-in-cell plasma simulation code for Intel Xeon Phi: a first look at Knights Landing
Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod, Russia
arXiv:1608.01009 [cs.DC], (2 Aug 2016)
@article{surmin2016codesign,
title={Co-design of a particle-in-cell plasma simulation code for Intel Xeon Phi: a first look at Knights Landing},
author={Surmin, Igor and Bastrakov, Sergey and Matveev, Zakhar and Efimenko, Evgeny and Gonoskov, Arkady and Meyerov, Iosif},
year={2016},
month={aug},
archivePrefix={"arXiv"},
primaryClass={cs.DC}
}
Three dimensional particle-in-cell laser-plasma simulation is an important area of computational physics. Solving state-of-the-art problems requires large-scale simulation on a supercomputer using specialized codes. A growing demand in computational resources inspires research in improving efficiency and co-design for supercomputers based on many-core architectures. This paper presents first performance results of the particle-in-cell plasma simulation code PICADOR on the recently introduced Knights Landing generation of Intel Xeon Phi. A straightforward rebuilding of the code yields a 2.43 x speedup compared to the previous Knights Corner generation. Further code optimization results in an additional 1.89 x speedup. The optimization performed is beneficial not only for Knights Landing, but also for high-end CPUs and Knights Corner. The optimized version achieves 100 GFLOPS double precision performance on a Knights Landing device with the speedups of 2.35 x compared to a 14-core Haswell CPU and 3.47 x compared to a 61-core Knights Corner Xeon Phi.
August 8, 2016 by hgpu