Publication Details
Andriy Kot, Andrey Chernikov and Nikos Chrisochoides.
Published in ACM Journal on Experimental Algorithmics, in press, 2011
Abstract
We present three related out-
of-core parallel mesh
generation algorithms and
their implementations for small size computational
clusters.
Computing out-of-core permits to solve larger
problems than otherwise
possible on the same hardware setup. Also, when
using shared computing
resources with high demand,
a problem can take longer to compute in terms
of wall-clock time when using an in-core algorithm
on many nodes instead of using an out-of-core
algorithm on few nodes.
The
difference is due to wait-in-queue delays that can
grow exponentially to the
number of requested nodes.
In one specific case, using our
best method and only 16 nodes it can take several
times less wall-clock
time to generate a 2 billion element mesh than to
generate the same size mesh
in-core with 121 nodes.
Although our best out-of-core method exhibits unavoidable overheads (could be as low as 19% in some cases) over the corresponding in-core method (for mesh sizes that fit completely in-core) this is a modest and expected performance penalty. We evaluated our methods on traditional clusters of workstations as well as presented preliminary performance evaluation on emerging BlueWaters supercomputer.
