Performance Optimization and Comparison of the Alternating Direction Implicit CFD Solver on Multi‐core and Many‐Core Architectures

Abstract

We accelerate a double precision Alternating direction implicit (ADI) solver for three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes equations from our in-house Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software on the latest multi-core and many-core architectures (Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs, Intel Many integrated core (MIC) coprocessors and NVIDIA Kepler K20c GPUs). Some performance optimization techniques are detailed discussed. We provide an in-depth analysis on the performance difference between Sandy Bridge and MIC. Experimental results show that the proposed GPU-enabled ADI solver can achieve a speedup of 5.5 on a Kepler GPU in contrast to two Sandy Bridge CPUs and our optimization techniques can improve the performance of the ADI solver by 2.5-fold on two Sandy Bridge CPUs and 1.7-fold on an Intel MIC coprocessor. We perform a cross-platform performance analysis (between GPU and MIC), which serves as case studies for developers to select the right accelerators for their target applications.