Performance of the 3D FFT on the 6D network torus QCDOC parallel supercomputer

Abstract

QCDOC is a massively parallel supercomputer with tens of thousands of nodes distributed on a six-dimensional torus network. The 6D structure of the network provides the needed communication resources for many communication-intensive applications. In this paper, we present a parallel algorithm for three-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform and its implementation for a 4096-node QCDOC prototype. Two techniques have been used to increase its parallel performance: simultaneous multi-dimensional communication and communication-and-computation overlapping. Benchmarking experiments suggest that 3D FFTs of size 128 × 128 × 128 can scale well on such platforms up to 4096 nodes. Our performance results suggest stronger scalability on QCDOC than on IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.