Runtime mechanisms to survive new HPC architectures: A use case in human respiratory simulations

Abstract

Computational fluid and particle dynamics (CFPD) simulations are of paramount importance for studying and improving drug effectiveness. Computational requirements of CFPD codes demand high-performance computing (HPC) resources. For these reasons, we introduce and evaluate in this article system software techniques for improving performance and tolerating load imbalance on a state-of-the-art production CFPD code. We demonstrate benefits of these techniques on Intel-, IBM- and Arm-based HPC technologies ranked in the Top500 supercomputers, showing the importance of using mechanisms applied at runtime to improve the performance independently of the underlying architecture. We run a real CFPD simulation of particle tracking on the human respiratory system, showing performance improvements of up to 2×, across different architectures, while applying runtime techniques and keeping constant the computational resources.