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SIMD Monte-Carlo Numerical Simulations Accelerated on GPU and Xeon Phi

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Abstract

The efficiency of a pleasingly parallel application is studied for several computing platforms. A real world problem, i.e., Monte-Carlo numerical simulations of stratospheric balloon envelope drift descent is considered. We detail the optimization of the SIMD parallel codes on the K40 and K80 GPUs as well as on the Intel Xeon Phi. We emphasize on loop and task parallelism, multi-threading and vectorization, respectively. The experiments show that GPU and MIC permit one to decrease computing time by non negligeable factors, as compared to a parallel code implemented on a two sockets CPU (E5-2680-v2) which finally allows us to use these devices in operational conditions.

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Acknowledgements

Dr. Didier El Baz and Dr. Bastien Plazolles gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Tesla K40 GPU used for this research work. The authors wish also to thank Dr. D. Gazen and Dr. J. Escobar of Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées for their advices and the access to the cluster in Toulouse. The authors thank the DEDALE work group coordinated by CNES, France. Finally, the authors thank the reviewers for their useful suggestions in order to improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LAAS-CNRS, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France

    Bastien Plazolles & Didier El Baz

  2. R.Tech, Parc Technologique Delta Sud, 09340, Verniolle, France

    Bastien Plazolles, Martin Spel & Vincent Rivola

  3. Géosciences Environnement Toulouse (CNRS UMR5563), 14 Avenue Edouard Belin, 31400, Toulouse, France

    Pascal Gegout

  4. Université de Toulouse, 31400, Toulouse, France

    Pascal Gegout

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  1. Bastien Plazolles
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  2. Didier El Baz
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  3. Martin Spel
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  4. Vincent Rivola
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  5. Pascal Gegout
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Correspondence to Didier El Baz.

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Plazolles, B., El Baz, D., Spel, M. et al. SIMD Monte-Carlo Numerical Simulations Accelerated on GPU and Xeon Phi. Int J Parallel Prog 46, 584–606 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-017-0509-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-017-0509-y

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