Brian Van Straalen

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2018-122

August 10, 2018

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2018/EECS-2018-122.pdf

Microprocessor designs are now changing to reflect the ending of Dennard Scaling. This leads to a reconsideration of design tradeoffs for designing discretization methods for PDEs based on simplified performance models like Roofline.

In this work we carry out an end-to-end analysis and implementation study on a Cray XC40 with Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 processors for the Method of Local Corrections (MLC). MLC is a non-iterative method for solving Poisson's Equation on locally rectangular meshes. The Roofline model predicts that MLC should have faster time to solution than traditional iterative methods such as Geometric Multigrid. We find that Roofline is a useful guide for performance engineering and obtain performance within a factor of 3 the Roofline performance upper bound. We determine that the algorithm is limited by identified architectural features that are not captured in the Roofline model, are quantifiable, and can be addressed in future implementations.

Advisors: Phillip Colella

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BibTeX citation:

@phdthesis{Van Straalen:EECS-2018-122,
    Author= {Van Straalen, Brian},
    Title= {Method of Local Corrections Solver for Manycore  Architectures},
    School= {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year= {2018},
    Month= {Aug},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2018/EECS-2018-122.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2018-122},
    Abstract= {  Microprocessor designs are now changing to reflect the ending of Dennard Scaling. This leads to a reconsideration of design tradeoffs for designing discretization methods for PDEs based on simplified performance models like Roofline.  

  In this work we carry out an end-to-end analysis and implementation study on a Cray XC40 with  Intel Xeon  E5-2698 v3 processors for the Method of Local Corrections (MLC). MLC is a non-iterative method for solving Poisson's Equation on locally rectangular meshes. The Roofline model predicts that MLC should have faster time to solution than traditional iterative methods such as Geometric Multigrid. We find that Roofline is a useful guide for performance engineering and obtain performance within a factor of 3 the Roofline performance upper bound. We determine that the algorithm is limited by identified architectural features that are not captured in the Roofline model, are quantifiable, and can be addressed in future implementations.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Thesis
%A Van Straalen, Brian 
%T Method of Local Corrections Solver for Manycore  Architectures
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2018
%8 August 10
%@ UCB/EECS-2018-122
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2018/EECS-2018-122.html
%F Van Straalen:EECS-2018-122