Summary The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is a widely used computational fluid dynamics method for flow problems with complex geometries and various boundary conditions. Large‐scale LBM simulations with increasing resolution and extending temporal range require massive high‐performance computing (HPC) resources, thus motivating us to port it onto modern many‐core heterogeneous supercomputers like Tianhe‐2. Although many‐core accelerators such as graphics processing unit and Intel MIC have a dramatic advantage of floating‐point performance and power efficiency over CPUs, they also pose a tough challenge to parallelize and optimize computational fluid dynamics codes on large‐scale heterogeneous system. In this paper, we parallelize and optimize the open source 3D multi‐phase LBM code openlbmflow on the Intel Xeon Phi (MIC) accelerated Tianhe‐2 supercomputer using a hybrid and heterogeneous MPI+OpenMP+Offload+single instruction, mulitple data (SIMD) programming model. With cache blocking and SIMD‐friendly data structure transformation, we dramatically improve the SIMD and cache efficiency for the single‐thread performance on both CPU and Phi, achieving a speedup of 7.9X and 8.8X, respectively, compared with the baseline code. To collaborate CPUs and Phi processors efficiently, we propose a load‐balance scheme to distribute workloads among intra‐node two CPUs and three Phi processors and use an asynchronous model to overlap the collaborative computation and communication as far as possible. The collaborative approach with two CPUs and three Phi processors improves the performance by around 3.2X compared with the CPU‐only approach. Scalability tests show that openlbmflow can achieve a parallel efficiency of about 60% on 2048 nodes, with about 400K cores in total. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest scale CPU‐MIC collaborative LBM simulation for 3D multi‐phase flow problems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper studies the performance characteristics of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications on Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture. Three CFD applications, BT-MZ, LM3D and HOSTA, are evaluated on Intel Knights Corner (KNC) coprocessor, the first public MIC product. The results show that the pure OpenMP scalability of these applications is not sufficient to utilize the potential of a KNC coprocessor. While utilizing the hybrid MPI/OpenMP programming model helps to improve the parallel scalability, the maximum parallel speedup relative to a single thread is still not satisfactory. The OpenCL version of BT-MZ performs better than the OpenMP version but is not comparable to the MPI version and the hybrid MPI/OpenMP version. At the micro-architecture level, while the three CFD applications achieve reasonable instruction execution rates and L1 data cache hit rates, use a large percent of vector instructions, they have low arithmetic density, incur very high branch misprediction rates and do not utilize the Vector Processing Unit efficiently. As a result, they achieve very low single thread floating-point efficiency. For these applications to attain competitive performance on the MIC architecture as on the Xeon processors, both the parallel scalability and the single thread performance should be improved, which is a difficult task.

HOSTA is an in-house high-order CFD software that can simulate complex flows with complex geometries. Large scale high-order CFD simulations using HOSTA require massive HPC resources, thus motivating us to port it onto modern GPU accelerated supercomputers like Tianhe-1A. To achieve a greater speedup and fully tap the potential of Tianhe-1A, we collaborate CPU and GPU for HOSTA instead of using a naive GPU-only approach. We present multiple novel techniques to balance the loads between the store-poor GPU and the store-rich CPU, and overlap the collaborative computation and communication as far as possible. Taking CPU and GPU load balance into account, we improve the maximum simulation problem size per Tianhe-1A node for HOSTA by 2.3X, meanwhile the collaborative approach can improve the performance by around 45% compared to the GPU-only approach. Scalability tests show that HOSTA can achieve a parallel efficiency of above 60% on 1024 Tianhe-1A nodes. With our method, we have successfully simulated China's large civil airplane configuration C919 containing 150M grid cells. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper that reports a CPUGPU collaborative high-order accurate aerodynamic simulation result with such a complex grid geometry.