Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Performance Modeling And Prediction For The Scalable Solution Of Partial Differential Equations On Unstructured Grids, Dinesh Kumar Kaushik

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation studies the sources of poor performance in scientific computing codes based on partial differential equations (PDEs), which typically perform at a computational rate well below other scientific simulations (e.g., those with dense linear algebra or N-body kernels) on modern architectures with deep memory hierarchies. We identify that the primary factors responsible for this relatively poor performance are: insufficient available memory bandwidth, low ratio of work to data size (good algorithmic efficiency), and nonscaling cost of synchronization and gather/scatter operations (for a fixed problem size scaling). This dissertation also illustrates how to reuse the legacy scientific and engineering software …