High-cost CFD on a low-cost cluster

  • Thomas Hauser
  • , Timothy I. Mattox
  • , Raymond P. LeBeau
  • , Henry G. Dietz
  • , P. George Huang

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    11 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Direct numerical simulation of the Navier-Stokes equations (DNS) is an important technique for the future of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in engineering applications. However, DNS requires massive computing resources. This paper presents a new approach for implementing high-cost DNS CFD using low-cost cluster hardware. After describing the DNS CFD code DNSTool, the paper focuses on the techniques and tools that we have developed to customize the performance of a cluster implementation of this application. This tuning of system performance involves both recoding of the application and careful engineering of the cluster design. Using the cluster KLAT2 (Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2), while DNSTool cannot match the $0.64 per MFLOPS that KLAT2 achieves on single precision ScaLAPACK, it is very efficient; DNSTool on KLAT2 achieves price/performance of $2.75 per MFLOPS double precision and $1.86 single precision. Further, the code and tools are all, or will soon be, made freely available as full source code.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationSC 2000 - Proceedings of the 2000 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
    ISBN (Electronic)0780398025
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2000
    Event2000 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing, SC 2000 - Dallas, United States
    Duration: Nov 4 2000Nov 10 2000

    Publication series

    NameProceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing
    Volume2000-November

    Conference

    Conference2000 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing, SC 2000
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityDallas
    Period11/4/0011/10/00

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