Strong Scaling of OpenACC enabled Nek5000 on several GPU based HPC systems (2109.03592v3)

Abstract: We present new results on the strong parallel scaling for the OpenACC-accelerated implementation of the high-order spectral element fluid dynamics solver Nek5000. The test case considered consists of a direct numerical simulation of fully-developed turbulent flow in a straight pipe, at two different Reynolds numbers $Re_\tau=360$ and $Re_\tau=550$, based on friction velocity and pipe radius. The strong scaling is tested on several GPU-enabled HPC systems, including the Swiss Piz Daint system, TACC's Longhorn, J\"ulich's JUWELS Booster, and Berzelius in Sweden. The performance results show that speed-up between 3-5 can be achieved using the GPU accelerated version compared with the CPU version on these different systems. The run-time for 20 timesteps reduces from 43.5 to 13.2 seconds with increasing the number of GPUs from 64 to 512 for $Re_\tau=550$ case on JUWELS Booster system. This illustrates the GPU accelerated version the potential for high throughput. At the same time, the strong scaling limit is significantly larger for GPUs, at about $2000-5000$ elements per rank; compared to about $50-100$ for a CPU-rank.