Highly Scalable Asynchronous Computing Method for Partial Differential Equations: A Path Towards Exascale

Abstract

Many natural and engineering systems are governed by nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) which result in a multiscale phenomena, e.g. turbulent flows. Numerical simulations of these problems are computationally very expensive and demand for extreme levels of parallelism. At realistic conditions, simulations are being carried out on massively parallel computers with hundreds of thousands of processing elements (PEs). It has been observed that communication between PEs as well as their synchronization at these extreme scales take up a significant portion of the total simulation time and result in poor scalability of codes. This issue is likely to pose a bottleneck in scalability of codes on future Exascale systems. In this work, we propose an asynchronous computing algorithm based on widely used finite difference methods to solve PDEs in which synchronization between PEs due to communication is relaxed at a mathematical level. We show that while stability is conserved when schemes are used asynchronously, accuracy is greatly degraded. Since message arrivals at PEs are random processes, so is the behavior of the error. We propose a new statistical framework in which we show that average errors drop always to first-order regardless of the original scheme. We propose new asynchrony-tolerant schemes that maintain accuracy when synchronization is relaxed. The quality of the solution is shown to depend, not only on the physical phenomena and numerical schemes, but also on the characteristics of the computing machine. A novel algorithm using remote memory access communications has been developed to demonstrate excellent scalability of the method for large-scale computing. Finally, we present a path to extend this method in solving complex multi-scale problems on Exascale machines.