Performance comparison of CFD-DEM solver MFiX-Exa, on GPUs and CPUs
Research Computing, University of Colorado, Boulder
arXiv:2108.08821 [cs.DC], (19 Aug 2021)
@misc{lao2021performance,
title={Performance comparison of CFD-DEM solver MFiX-Exa, on GPUs and CPUs},
author={Shandong Lao and Aaron Holt and Deepthi Vaidhynathan and Hariswaran Sitaraman and Christine M. Hrenya and Thomas Hauser},
year={2021},
eprint={2108.08821},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.DC}
}
We present computational performance comparisons of gas-solid simulations performed on current CPU and GPU architectures using MFiX Exa, a CFD-DEM solver that leverages hybrid CPU+GPU parallelism. A representative fluidized bed simulation with varying particle numbers from 2 to 67 million is used to compare serial and parallel performance. A single GPU was observed to be about 10 times faster compared to a single CPU core. The use of 3 GPUs on a single compute node was observed to be 4x faster than using all 64 CPU cores. We also observed that using an error controlled adaptive time stepping scheme for particle advance provided a consistent 4x speed-up on both CPUs and GPUs. Weak scaling results indicate superior parallel efficiencies when using GPUs compared to CPUs for the problem sizes studied in this work.
August 22, 2021 by hgpu
