OPTIMIZATION AND PROFILING OF THE CACHE PERFORMANCE OF PARALLEL LATTICE BOLTZMANN CODES

Abstract

When designing and implementing highly efficient scientific applications for parallel computers such as clusters of workstations, it is inevitable to consider and to optimize the single-CPU performance of the codes. For this purpose, it is particularly important that the codes respect the hierarchical memory designs that computer architects employ in order to hide the effects of the growing gap between CPU performance and main memory speed. In this article, we present techniques to enhance the single-CPU efficiency of lattice Boltzmann methods which are commonly used in computational fluid dynamics. We show various performance results for both 2D and 3D codes in order to emphasize the effectiveness of our optimization techniques.