Publications
Strong and Weak Scaling of the Sierra/SD Eigenvector Problem to a Billion Degrees of Freedom
Sierra/SD [1, 2] is a structural dynamics finite element software package that is known for its scalability and performance on DOE supercomputers. While there are historical documents demonstrating weak and strong scaling on DOE systems such as Redsky [3], no such formal studies have been done on modern architectures. This report demonstrates that Sierra/SD still scales on modern architectures. Non structured meshes in the shape of an I-Beam are solved in sizes ranging from fifty thousand degrees of freedom in serial up to one and a half billion de- grees of freedom on over eighteen thousand processors using only default solver options. The report serves as a baseline for users to estimate computation cost of finite element analyses in Sierra/SD, understand how solver options relate to computational costs, and pick optimal pro- cessor counts to solve a given problem size, as well as a baseline for evaluating computational cost and scalability on next generation architectures. Acknowledgements The Sierra/SD software package is the collective effort of many individuals and teams. The core Sandia National Laboratories based Sierra/SD development team responsible for maintenance of documentation and support of code capabilities includes Gregory Bunting, Nathan Crane, David Day, Clark Dohrmann, Brian Ferri, Robert Flicek, Sean Hardesty, Payton Lindsay, Scott Miller, Lynn Munday, Brian Stevens and Tim Walsh. The Sierra/SD team also works closely with external collaborators in academia including Wilkins Aquino and Murthy Guddati. Dozens of full time and summer students have provided extensive support to the Sierra/SD team in the fields of capability development and code testing and verification. Additionally the Sierra/SD team works closely as part of the larger Sierra code suite and receives extensive support from the Sierra DevOps team, Sierra Toolkit team, and maintains close collaborations with the Sierra Solid Mechanics and Thermal Fluid teams.