Communication primitives for unstructured finite element simulations on data parallel architectures

Abstract

Efficient data motion is critical for high performance computing on distributed memory architectures. The value of some techniques for efficient data motion is illustrated by identifying generic communication primitives. Further, the efficiency of these primitives is demonstrated on three different applications using the finite element method for unstructured grids and sparse solvers with different communication requirements. For the applications presented, the techniques advocated reduced the communication times by a factor of between 1.5 - 3.