Performance tuning of CEED software and first wave apps
The goal of this milestone was the performance tuning of the CEED software and first wave apps. In this milestone, the CEED team developed optimization techniques and tuned for performance the CEED software. Specifically, the focus was on the following: (1) Fast finite element operator storage and evaluation using partial assembly/matrix-free algorithms that take advantage of tensor-product element structure; (2) Architecture optimizations, including the development of performant discretization libraries targeting heterogeneous systems with multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and/or many-core CPUs in single node, cluster, or large-scale ECP supercomputer configurations; and (3) Global kernels for finite element operators, including the development of algorithms and libraries for fast gather-scatter exchanges for action assembly on unstructured graphs and for components needed for global linear solvers. A main part of this milestone was the performance tuning of the CEED first-wave ECP applications. This included the ExaSMR application – Coupled Monte Carlo Neutronics and Fluid Flow Simulation of Small Modular Reactors (ORNL), and the MARBL application – Next-Gen Multi-physics Simulation Code (LLNL). The artifacts delivered include performance improvements in CEED’s 1st wave of applications, and tuned CEED software for various architectures through a number of backends, freely available in the CEED’s repository on GitHub. See the CEED website, http://ceed.exascaleproject.org and the CEED GitHub organization, http://github.com/ceed for more details. In addition to details and results from the above R&D efforts, in this document we are also reporting on other project-wide activities performed in Q4 of FY18 including: CEED’s second annual meeting, a successful minisymposium at the premier international conference on high-order methods (ICOSAHOM), making the CEED milestone reports publicly available, new Laghos release, and other outreach efforts.