An Evaluation of HPF and MPI Approaches and Performance in Unstructured Finite Element Simulations

摘要

The High Performance Fortran (HPF) language and the Message Passing Interface (MPI) are two widely used methods to achieve parallelism on today's clusters and multiprocessor supercomputers. HPF is a distinct language providing extensions to Fortran 90/95 to express parallel execution paths and regions. MPI is a library of communication calls that can be inserted into modern high-level languages (C and Fortran). This paper discusses the use of the two approaches in a parallel finite element application for liquid composite manufacturing process modeling. The unstructured nature of the code provides an excellent opportunity to test both the computation and communication effectiveness of the two approaches. We discuss performance results based on implementations conducted on a modern massively parallel computing platform with a highly tuned processor interconnection network.