Performance and scalability analysis of teraflop-scale parallel architectures using multidimensional wavefront applications

The authors develop a model for the parallel performance of algorithms that consist of concurrent, two-dimensional wavefronts implemented in a message passing environment. The model, based on a LogGP machine parameterization, combines the separate contributions of computation and communication wavefronts. They validate the model on three important supercomputer systems, on up to 500 processors. They use data from a deterministic particle transport application taken from the ASCI workload, although the model is general to any wavefront algorithm implemented on a 2-D processor domain. They also use the validated model to make estimates of performance and scalability of wavefront algorithms on 100-TFLOPS computer systems expected to be in existence within the next decade as part of the ASCI program and elsewhere. In this context, they analyze two problem sizes. The model shows that on the largest such problem (1 billion cells), inter-processor communication performance is not the bottleneck. Single-node efficiency is the dominant factor