First experience of compressible gas dynamics simulation on the Los Alamos roadrunner machine

We report initial experience with gas dynamics simulation on the Los Alamos Roadrunner machine. In this initial work, we have restricted our attention to flows in which the flow Mach number is less than 2. This permits us to use a simplified version of the PPM gas dynamics algorithm that has been described in detail by Woodward (2006). We follow a multifluid volume fraction using the PPB moment‐conserving advection scheme, enforcing both pressure and temperature equilibrium between two monatomic ideal gases within each grid cell. The resulting gas dynamics code has been extensively restructured for efficient multicore processing and implemented for scalable parallel execution on the Roadrunner system. The code restructuring and parallel implementation are described and performance results are discussed. For a modest grid size, sustained performance of 3.89 Gflops−1 CPU‐core−1 is delivered by this code on 36 Cell processors in 9 triblade nodes of a single rack of Roadrunner hardware. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.