Future Technologies Colloquium Series


Task Placement of Parallel FFTs on a Mesh Communication Network


Heike Jagode
TU Dresden Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) Dresden, Germany
October 11, 2007
10:00 AM

ORNL, 5600-J304

Host: Jeff Vetter (vetter@ornl.gov )


ABSTRACT:

For many scientific applications, the fast Fourier transformation (FFT) of multi-dimensional data is the kernel that limits scalability to large numbers of processors. This talk summarizes the investigation of the potential scope for performance improvements of a parallel FFT by choosing different mappings between the virtual processor grid of the algorithm and the physical hardware of a system with a mesh interconnect. Based on bandwidth considerations, a simple model for the performance of a large class of mappings is derived. The predictions of the model are tested on an IBM eServer Blue Gene/L system. The results demonstrate that a carefully chosen mapping pattern with regards to the network characteristics yields significant improvement.


# # #