High-speed turbulent flows towards the exascale: STREAmS-2 porting and performance

Abstract

Exascale High Performance Computing (HPC) represents a tremendous opportunity to push the boundaries of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), but despite the consolidated trend towards the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), programmability is still an issue. STREAmS-2 (Bernardini et al. Comput. Phys. Commun. 285 (2023) 108644) is a compressible solver for canonical wall-bounded turbulent flows capable of harvesting the potential of NVIDIA GPUs. Here we extend the already available CUDA Fortran backend with a novel HIP backend targeting AMD GPU architectures. The main implementation strategies are discussed along with a novel Python tool that can generate the HIP and CPU code versions allowing developers to focus their attention only on the CUDA Fortran backend. Single GPU performance is analyzed focusing on NVIDIA A100 and AMD MI250x cards which are currently at the core of several HPC clusters. The gap between peak GPU performance and STREAmS-2 performance is found to be generally smaller for NVIDIA cards. Roofline analysis allows tracing this behavior to unexpectedly different computational intensities of the same kernel using the two cards. Additional single-GPU comparisons are performed to assess the impact of grid size, number of parallelized loops, thread masking and thread divergence. Parallel performance is measured on the two largest EuroHPC pre-exascale systems, LUMI (AMD GPUs) and Leonardo (NVIDIA GPUs). Strong scalability reveals more than 80% efficiency up to 16 nodes for Leonardo and up to 32 for LUMI. Weak scalability shows an impressive efficiency of over 95% up to the maximum number of nodes tested (256 for LUMI and 512 for Leonardo). This analysis shows that STREAmS-2 is the perfect candidate to fully exploit the power of current pre-exascale HPC systems in Europe, allowing users to simulate flows with over a trillion mesh points, thus reducing the gap between the Reynolds numbers achievable in high-fidelity simulations and those of real engineering applications.