[FLASH-USERS] FLASH Scaling Data

[Robert Fisher]

Dear Jason :

  The gold standard is to include your own metrics on as similar a platform
as possible -- ideally the one you are proposing time on. This is because
scaling depends not just upon the code you are using, but also of course
upon the hardware and software library stacks implemented upon it. As a
result, hard experience teaches that just because a code can scan on one
platform, does not necessarily mean it will scale on another platform, even
with identical setups.

  That said, if the proposal is for a relatively small amount of time on a
relatively small number of cores, and if the physics is primarily
hydrodynamics, referring to the studies that Lynn mentions might suffice to
convince your reviewers. However, even in those instances, I'd strongly
recommend including your own statistics if at all possible, since it shows
the review committee that you've done your homework. FLASH has built-in
coarse-grained timing diagnostics output at the end of each complete run,
so it's not that that difficult to gather these.

  Best wishes,

  Bob

On Sun, May 6, 2018 at 11:05 PM Jason Galyardt <jason.galyardt at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on an proposal for a compute time allocation at a major
> cluster facility. The proposal guidelines request quantitative evidence
> concerning the parallel performance, stability, and scalability of FLASH.
> Network and I/O bandwidth benchmarks are also requested. I realize that
> there is quite a bit of variability in these performance metrics according
> to the particular simulation, physics included, solver used, etc. However,
> I have seen some old (FLASH 2 era) scalability studies; how extensible are
> such studies? Is it necessary to profile one's own simulation for such
> proposals? If so, are there any recommended profiling tools / procedures,
> aside from those included in FLASH?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jason
>
> --------------
> Jason Galyardt, PhD
> University of Georgia
>
-- 
Dr. Robert Fisher
Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director
Physics Department
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
285 Old Westport Road
North Dartmouth, Ma. 02740
http://www.novastella.org
robert.fisher at umassd.edu
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