[petsc-users] petsc example with known scalability

Mohammad Mirzadeh mirzadeh at gmail.com
Fri May 18 19:08:09 CDT 2012


Yes. Its fairly flat which I think is due to BoomerAMG. [8, 8, 9, 11, 12]

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 8:02 PM, Mohammad Mirzadeh <mirzadeh at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Yes, I'm looking at weak scalability right now. I'm using BiCGSTAB with
>> BoomerAMG (all default options except for rtol = 1e-12). I've not looked
>> into MF/s yet but I'll surely do to see if I'm having any problem there. So
>> far, just timing the KSPSolve, I get [0.231, 0.238, 0.296, 0.451, 0.599]
>> seconds/KSP iteration for p=[1, 4, 16, 64, 256] with almost 93K nodes
>> (matrix-row) per proc. Which is not bad I guess but still increased by a
>> factor of 3 for 256 proc. Problem is, I don't know how good/bad this is. In
>> fact I'm not even sure that is a valid question to ask since it may be very
>> problem dependent.
>>
>> Something I just though about, how crucial is the matrix structure for
>> KSP solvers? The nodes have bad numbering and I do partitioning to get a
>> better one here.
>>
>
>  Did you look at the number of iterates?
>
>    Matt
>
>
>>
>> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 7:43 PM, Mohammad Mirzadeh <mirzadeh at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> I see; well that's a fair point. So i have my timing results obtained
>>>> via -log_summary; what should I be looking into for MatMult? Should I be
>>>> looking at wall timings? Or do I need to look into MFlops/s? I'm sorry but
>>>> I'm not sure what measure I should be looking into to determine scalability.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Time is only meaningful in isolation if I know how big your matrix is,
>>> but you obviously take the ratio to look how it is scaling. I am
>>> assuming you are looking at weak scalability so it should remain
>>> constant. MF/s will let you know how the routine is performing
>>> independent of size, and thus is an easy way to see what is happening.
>>> It should scale like P, and when that drops off you have
>>> insufficient bandwidth. VecMDot is a good way to look at the latency of
>>> reductions (assuming you use GMRES). There is indeed no
>>> good guide to this. Barry should write one.
>>>
>>>     Matt
>>>
>>>
>>>>  Also, is there any general meaningful advice one could give? in terms
>>>> of using the resources, compiler flags (beyond -O3), etc?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Mohammad
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Mohammad Mirzadeh <mirzadeh at gmail.com
>>>>> > wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi guys,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm trying to generate scalability plots for my code and do profiling
>>>>>> and fine tuning. In doing so I have noticed that some of the factors
>>>>>> affecting my results are sort of subtle. For example, I figured, the other
>>>>>> day, that using all of the cores on a single node is somewhat (50-60%)
>>>>>> slower when compared to using only half of the cores which I suspect is due
>>>>>> to memory bandwidth and/or other hardware-related issues.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So I thought to ask and see if there is any example in petsc that has
>>>>>> been tested for scalability and has been documented? Basically I want to
>>>>>> use this test example as a benchmark to compare my results with. My own
>>>>>> test code is currently a linear Poisson solver on an adaptive quadtree grid
>>>>>> and involves non-trivial geometry (well basically a circle for the boundary
>>>>>> but still not a simple box).
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Unfortunately, I do not even know what that means. We can't guarantee
>>>>> a certain level of performance because it not
>>>>> only depends on the hardware, but how you use it (as evident in your
>>>>> case). In a perfect world, we would have an abstract
>>>>> model of the computation (available for MatMult) and your machine (not
>>>>> available anywhere) and we would automatically
>>>>> work out the consequences and tell you what to expect. Instead today,
>>>>> we tell you to look at a few key indicators like the
>>>>> MatMult event, to see what is going on. When MatMult stops scaling,
>>>>> you have run out of bandwidth.
>>>>>
>>>>>     Matt
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>> Mohammad
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
>>>>> experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
>>>>> experiments lead.
>>>>> -- Norbert Wiener
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
>>> experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
>>> experiments lead.
>>> -- Norbert Wiener
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
> experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
> experiments lead.
> -- Norbert Wiener
>
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