Parallel Programming Strategies for Irregular Adaptive Applications

Achieving scalable performance for dynamic irregular applications is eminently challenging. Traditional message-passing approaches have been making steady progress towards this goal; however, they suffer from complex implementation requirements. The use of a global address space greatly simplifies the programming task, but can degrade the performance for such computations. In this work, we examine two typical irregular adaptive applications, Dynamic Remeshing and N-Body, under competing programming methodologies and across various parallel architectures. The Dynamic Remeshing application simulates flow over an airfoil, and refines localized regions of the underlying unstructured mesh. The N-Body experiment models two neighboring Plummer galaxies that are about to undergo a merger. Both problems demonstrate dramatic changes in processor workloads and interprocessor communication with time; thus, dynamic load balancing is a required component.