Performance optimization of an integral equation code for jet engine scattering on CRAY-C90
Article
Smelyanskiy, M, Davidson, ES, Volakis, JL. (1998). Performance optimization of an integral equation code for jet engine scattering on CRAY-C90
. APPLIED COMPUTATIONAL ELECTROMAGNETICS SOCIETY JOURNAL, 13(2), 116-130.
Smelyanskiy, M, Davidson, ES, Volakis, JL. (1998). Performance optimization of an integral equation code for jet engine scattering on CRAY-C90
. APPLIED COMPUTATIONAL ELECTROMAGNETICS SOCIETY JOURNAL, 13(2), 116-130.
The numerical solution of Maxwell's equations is a computationally intensive task and use of high-performance parallel computing facilities is necessary for the larger class of practical problems in scattering, propagation and antenna modeling. It is therefore necessary to carefully consider algorithm optimizations aimed at improving the code's run time performance on the computing platform employed. Although some performance improvement can be derived from compiler-level optimizations, further speed-up may involve manual effort in algorithm restructuring, data layout, and parallelization. This paper focuses on the manual optimizations used to improve the performance of a moment method code for the analysis of a cylindrically periodic structure, as is the case with a jet engine. We describe the steps taken which resulted in nearly two orders of magnitude improvement over the original version of the code. A 16-processor shared-memory CRAY-C90 vector supercomputer was employed. Our optimization took advantage of SSD its solid-state storage, enabled better loop vectorizations, parallelized the matrix_fill routine, and called appropriate CRAY-C90 library routines.
