17053048
Performance Testing of a Parallel Multiblock CFD Solver
A distributed-memory version of the OVERFLOW computational fluid dynamics code was evaluated on several parallel systems and compared with other approaches using test cases provided by the NASA-Boeing High-Speed Civil Transport program. A principal goal was to develop partitioning and load-balancing strategies that led to a reduction in computation time. We found multipartitioning, in which the aspect ratio of the multipartition is close to the aspect ratio of the grid zone, offered the best performance. The (uniprocessor) performance of the CRAY vector systems was superior to all other systems tested. However, the distributed-memory version when run on an SGI Origin system offers a price performance advantage over the CRAY vector systems.Performance on personal computer systems is promising but faces several hurdles.
20665084
Parallel performance of two applications in the Boeing high performance computing benchmark suite
Abstract We describe our work to evaluate the performance of the parallel versions of two floating-point-intensive engineering applications from Boeing's high performance computing benchmark suite (BHPCBS) on emerging RISC parallel systems and PC clusters. The first application is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, OVERFLOW, developed by NASA and used by Boeing for analysis and design of advanced aircraft. The second application is a prototype of a computational electromagnetics (CEM) code, developed by Boeing and used for radar cross-section studies. The distributed memory parallel versions of both applications use the message passing interface (MPI) standard for message passing. The goal of our work was to determine whether RISC parallel systems and PC clusters, which offer high performance at low cost, may be able to meet Boeing's computing requirements in the future. We describe the test environments for the studies, discuss parallelization issues and strategies and present performance data for the two applications.
16053840
Parallel computation of three-dimensional nonlinear magnetostatic problems
We describe a general-purpose parallel electromagnetic code for computing accurate solutions to large computationally demanding, 3D, nonlinear magnetostatic problems. The code, CORAL, is based on a volume integral equation formulation. Using an IBM SP parallel computer and iterative solution methods, we successfully solved the dense linear systems inherent in such formulations. A key component of our work was the use of the PETSc library, which provides parallel portability and access to the latest linear algebra solution technology.
20578112
The art and science of computer graphics: a very depth-first approach to the non-majors course
This paper describes a course in computer graphics which is designed for students with little or no background in computer science. The course is centered around custom software which was designed with the pedagogical goals in mind. The goals of the course, the software, and some experiences at two institutions are discussed.
15495414
A tool based methodology for development of automatically scalable and reusable parallel code
Program performance may be improved by efficiently programming some key sections of the software. We present a methodology for converting selected portions of source code into automatically scalable multithreaded routines, without forcing programmers to concentrate on parallel programming issues. These developed routines can be reused across various projects, operating systems and system architectures. To support this methodology two separate but tightly coupled tools have been developed -PARSA/sup (TM)/ software development environment (SDE) and the ThreadMan/sup (TM)/ thread manager. The SDE addresses programming issues by allowing a graphical object based approach to develop multithreaded routines that abstracts the users from parallel programming. ThreadMan manages the software developed using SDE. ThreadMan is a user-level thread manager that automatically spawns and schedules threads at runtime. Two examples have been developed using this methodology to demonstrate that there is virtually no degradation in performance when compared to sequential code, in a single processor system and scalability is achieved as the number of processors is increased.
35397691
Accomplishing More by Doing Less - Lessons from Spanish Language Instruction
38463254
Locating and Ranking XML Documents Based on Content and Structure Synopses
We present a new framework for indexing, locating and ranking XML documents based on content and structural synopses extracted from the documents. Instead of indexing each single element or term in a document, we extract a structural summary and a small number of data synopses from the document, which are indexed in an efficient way suitable for query evaluation. Our query language is XPath extended with full-text search. The result of query evaluation is a ranked list of document locations that best match the query. We propose a novel aggregated ranking scheme, which is integrated into the query evaluation to score the documents based on those data synopses. Our experimental evaluation shows that our indexing scheme outperforms the standard XML indexing scheme based on inverted lists and our ranking scheme is effective in terms of precision and recall.