Accelerating the Simulation of Thermal Convection in the Earth's Outer Core on Tianhe-2

Abstract

Numerical simulation of thermal convection in the Earth's outer core requires extreme-scale computing due to the large temporal and spatial disparity, extreme physical parameters, rapid rotation and spherical geometry. In this work, the numerical simulation of the thermal convection in the Earth's outer core for CPU-MIC heterogeneous many-core systems is studied. Firstly, starting from a legacy parallel code based on the PETSc software package, a framework of the numerical simulation built on CPU-MIC heterogeneous many-core systems has been developed. Secondly, a sparse linear solver for CPUMIC heterogeneous many-core systems, which focuses on solving the two linear systems of the simulation, is presented and optimized. Thirdly, some computational kernels of the simulation, including sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) and polynomial preconditioner on distributed memory Xeon Phiaccelerated systems are implemented and optimized. In addition, in order to reduce the cost of data movement, we use methods to minimize the memory access, the PCI-E data transfer, and the MPI communication. Finally, some optimized measures are taken to the extended code. Experiments on Tianhe-2 Supercomputer show that as compared to the original code, our Xeon Phiaccelerated design is able to deliver 6.93x and 6.00x speedups for single MIC device and 64 MIC devices, respectively.