Towards Petascale Cosmological Simulations with ChaNGa
PPL Technical Report 2007
Publication Type: Paper
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Abstract
Cosmological simulators are currently an important component in the
study of the formation of galaxies and large scale structures, and
can help answer many important questions about the universe.
Despite their utility, existing parallel simulators do not scale
effectively on modern machines containing thousands of processors.
In this paper we present ChaNGa, a recently released production
simulator based on the Charm++ infrastructure. To achieve scalable
performance, ChaNGa employs various optimizations that maximize the
overlap between computation and communication. Other optimizations
described in the paper include a particle caching mechanism and a
recently added multi-timestepping scheme. The paper shows
experimental results demonstrating scalable performance for
simulations on machines with thousands of processors, including
IBM-BlueGene/L and Cray-XT3. We conclude by pointing to our current
work, which focuses on developing new load balancing strategies to
further improve ChaNGa?s parallel efficiency. To our knowledge,
ChaNGa is presently the most scalable cosmological simulator
available.
People
- Filippo Gioachin
- Pritish Jetley
- Celso Mendes
- Laxmikant Kale
- Thomas Quinn
Research Areas