Scaling of a Fast Fourier Transform and a pseudo-spectral fluid solver up to 196608 cores

In this paper we present scaling results of a FFT library, FFTK, and a pseudospectral code, Tarang, on grid resolutions up to 81923 grid using 65536 cores of Blue Gene/P and 196608 cores of Cray XC40 supercomputers. We observe that communication dominates computation, more so on the Cray XC40. The computation time scales as T-comp similar to p(-1), and the communication time as T-comm similar to n(-gamma 2) with gamma(2) ranging from 0.7 to 0.9 for Blue Gene/P, and from 0.43 to 0.73 for Cray XC40. FFTK, and the fluid and convection solvers of Tarang exhibit weak as well as strong scaling nearly up to 196608 cores of Cray XC40. We perform a comparative study of the performance on the Blue Gene/P and Cray XC40 clusters. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.