Strategies to Improve the Performance of a Geophysics Model for Different Manycore Systems

Abstract

Many software mechanisms for geophysics exploration in Oil & Gas industries are based on wave propagation simulation. To perform such simulations, state-of-art HPC architectures are employed, generating results faster and with more accuracy at each generation. The software must evolve to support the new features of each design to keep performance scaling. Furthermore, it is important to understand the impact of each change applied to the software, in order to improve the performance as most as possible. In this paper, we propose several optimization strategies for a wave propagation model for five architectures: Intel Haswell, Intel Knights Corner, Intel Knights Landing, NVIDIA Kepler and NVIDIA Maxwell. We focus on improving the cache memory usage, vectorization, and locality in the memory hierarchy. We analyze the hardware impact of the optimizations, providing insights of how each strategy can improve the performance. The results show that NVIDIA Maxwell improves over Intel Haswell, Intel Knights Corner, Intel Knights Landing and NVIDIA Kepler performance by up to 17.9x.