A holistic scalable implementation approach of the lattice Boltzmann method for CPU/GPU heterogeneous clusters

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from MDPI via the DOI in this record.Heterogeneous clusters are a widely utilized class of supercomputers assembled from different types of computing devices, for instance CPUs and GPUs, providing a huge computational potential. Programming them in a scalable way exploiting the maximal performance introduces numerous challenges such as optimizations for different computing devices, dealing with multiple levels of parallelism, the application of different programming models, work distribution, and hiding of communication with computation. We utilize the lattice Boltzmann method for fluid flow as a representative of a scientific computing application and develop a holistic implementation for large-scale CPU/GPU heterogeneous clusters. We review and combine a set of best practices and techniques ranging from optimizations for the particular computing devices to the orchestration of tens of thousands of CPU cores and thousands of GPUs. Eventually, we come up with an implementation using all the available computational resources for the lattice Boltzmann method operators. Our approach shows excellent scalability behavior making it future-proof for heterogeneous clusters of the upcoming architectures on the exaFLOPS scale. Parallel efficiencies of more than 90% are achieved leading to 2,604.72 GLUPS utilizing 24,576 CPU cores and 2,048 GPUs of the CPU/GPU heterogeneous cluster Piz Daint and computing more than 6.8 · 109 lattice cells.This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre “Invasive Computing” (SFB/TR 89). In addition, this work was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) under project ID d68. We further thank the Max Planck Computing & Data Facility (MPCDF) and the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) for providing computational resources