A hybrid MPI-OpenMP scheme for scalable parallel pseudospectral computations for fluid turbulence

Abstract: A hybrid scheme that utilizes MPI for distributed memory parallelism and OpenMP for shared memory parallelism is presented. The work is motivated by the desire to achieve exceptionally high Reynolds numbers in pseudospectral computations of fluid turbulence on emerging petascale, high core-count, massively parallel processing systems. The hybrid implementation derives from and augments a well-tested scalable MPI-parallelized pseudospectral code. The hybrid paradigm leads to a new picture for the domain decomposition of the pseudospectral grids, which is helpful in understanding, among other things, the 3D transpose of the global data that is necessary for the parallel fast Fourier transforms that are the central component of the numerical discretizations. Details of the hybrid implementation are provided, and performance tests illustrate the utility of the method. It is shown that the hybrid scheme achieves near ideal scalability up to ~20000 compute cores with a maximum mean efficiency of 83%. Data are presented that demonstrate how to choose the optimal number of MPI processes and OpenMP threads in order to optimize code performance on two different platforms.