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An (almost) direct deployment of the Fast Multipole Method on the Cell processor

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Abstract

This paper presents the first deployment of the Fast Multipole Method on the Cell processor (PowerXCell 8i). We rely on the matrix formulation with BLAS routines of the FMB code (Fast Multipole with BLAS) in order to directly and efficiently offload the most time consuming operators of both far field and near field computations on the Cell heterogeneous cores. We detail the difficulties that had to be solved first, and we finally obtain a deployment in single and double precisions, which scales linearly on several Cell blades and which is able to handle both uniform and non-uniform distributions of particles. We also present our performance results and comparisons with multicore CPUs, as well as the limitations of our deployment on the Cell processor.

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Acknowledgements

This work was carried out with partial support from HPC@LR, a Competence Center in High-Performance Computing from the Languedoc-Roussillon region, funded by the Languedoc-Roussillon region, the European Union, and the Université Montpellier 2 Sciences et Techniques. The authors would like to cordially thank the system teams at HPC@LR and at Polytech’Paris-UPMC, as well as B. Cirou at CINES, for helpful assistance during the performance tests.

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  1. LIP6, UPMC Univ. Paris 06 and CNRS UMR 7606, 4 place Jussieu, 75252, Paris cedex 05, France

    Pierre Fortin & Jean-Luc Lamotte

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  1. Pierre Fortin
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  2. Jean-Luc Lamotte
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Correspondence to Pierre Fortin.

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Fortin, P., Lamotte, JL. An (almost) direct deployment of the Fast Multipole Method on the Cell processor. J Supercomput 65, 1205–1222 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-013-0877-z

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