SC19 Proceedings

The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis

From Piz Daint to the Stars: Simulation of Stellar Mergers Using High-Level Abstractions


Authors: Gregor Daiß (University of Stuttgart), Parsa Amini (Louisiana State University), John Biddiscombe (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)), Patrick Diehl (Louisiana State University), Juhan Frank (Louisiana State University), Kevin Huck (University of Oregon), Hartmut Kaiser (Louisiana State University), Dominic Marcello (Louisiana State University), David Pfander (University of Stuttgart), Dirk Pflüger (University of Stuttgart)

Abstract: We study the simulation of stellar mergers, which requires complex simulations with high computational demands. We have developed Octo-Tiger, a finite volume grid-based hydrodynamics simulation code with Adaptive Mesh Refinement which is unique in conserving both linear and angular momentum to machine precision. To face the challenge of increasingly complex, diverse, and heterogeneous HPC systems, Octo-Tiger relies on high-level programming abstractions.

We use HPX with its futurization capabilities to ensure scalability both between nodes and within, and present first results replacing MPI with libfabric achieving up to a 2.8x speedup. We extend Octo-Tiger to heterogeneous GPU-accelerated supercomputers, demonstrating node-level performance and portability. We show scalability up to full system runs on Piz Daint. For the scenario's maximum resolution, the compute-critical parts (hydrodynamics and gravity) achieve 68.1% parallel efficiency at 2048 nodes.



Presentation: file


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