Application Explorations for Future Interconnects

For over two decades the dominant means for enabling portable performance of computational science and engineering applications on parallel processing architectures has been the bulk-synchronous parallel programming model. Code developers, motivated by performance considerations to minimize the number of messages transmitted, have typically strived to increase the size of each message through aggregation strategies. Emerging and future architectures, especially those seen as targeting Exascale capabilities, provide motivation and capabilities for revisiting this approach. In this paper we explore alternative configurations within the context of a large-scale complex multi-physics application and a proxy that represents its behavior, presenting results that demonstrate some important advantages as the number of processors increases in scale.