Parallella Community

Hey everybody,

I just discovered the parallella and I am thinking of buying one. I am a student in the field of Aerodynamics. I most of the time work with SU2 and I was wondering if it is possible to compile SU2 for the parallella. I read on the SU2 page that it runs on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor and I thought that maybe the step to the parallella is not so big. The main concern I have is the memory usage. Normal simulations running on 4 -8 cores take about 3 gb of ram per core (8 million cells), which is not available in the parallella. Is there a work around, or is this board simply not ment for such computations?

Thank you for your help!

Wouter

Thanks for the request. It would be interesting, but gut feeling it would be a tough porting process...
-SU2 code written in C++ (likely too big for Epiphany cores)
-SU2 needs double precision floating point
Andreas

Dear Andreas,

Thank you for your fast reply! It is a pity to hear that SU2 is probably not going to run on the parallella. I was wondering if it is possible to run CFD software on the parallella? (either current packages, or home made software) I am not very familiar with parallel computing other then the standard MPI stuf. I can imagine that it would be valuable to have a high powered card running CFD software.

Thank you for your reply!

Wouter

I did my master's thesis about CFD on Epiphany (Lattice Boltzmann algorithm), but it's not published yet. Should be out in a few weeks at most. I did not even try double precision or lattices larger than local memory (i.e. 104x104 maximum lattice size on E16). The scalability was very good, computing speed was okay, but the combination of "too small local memory" and "too little shared memory bandwidth" killed it.

Nice! Look forward to seeing the results! Can you elaborate on the bottleneck wrt to memory size and memory bandwidth?
-what if you had 128KB of memory per core?
-what if you had thousands of cores on a card?
-what kind of interprocessor communication were you running?
Andreas

I am looking forward to reading your Thesis! Is your code available after the publication or is it private? Do you know if "traditional" finite volume methods are also tried on the Parallella?

For the memory part we use the rule of thump of around 4gb memory per core. I don't know how to scale this properly to the Parallella.

Thank you for you detailed awnser! I think for now it might not be the best option to start running CFD (out of the box). However I think I will try one to see if some FVM code can be developed for it!