Benchmark of parallelization methods for unstructured shock capturing code

This paper presents benchmark results of three different parallel-programming paradigms on an unstructured shock capturing numerical code for transient problems. The three parallel programming methods include: (1) a shared-memory programming of OpenMP using cache coherent non-uniform memory access (CC-NUMA) of SGI Origin2000 (2) an MPI (Message Passing Interface) implementation and (3) a SHMEM implementation using the parallel library called “Shared Memory Access Library”. The methods (2) and (3) are both based on distributed memory architecture. SGI Origin2000 is used throughout the current study. It is found that the scalability of the programming (1) is so poor that its usage for the unstructured CFD code is impractical. The scalabilities of programming (2) and (3) are much better than programming (1) and the computational speed of giga-flops range can be achieved with 16 CPUs. The parallel programming with SHMEM libraries is approximately twice as fast as the one with MPI