Efficient temporal blocking for stencil computations by multicore-aware wavefront parallelization

Date: Friday, May 15, 2009
Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm
Location:LBNL Bldg. 50A, Room 5132

Speaker:
Dr. Gerhard Wellein
Regionales Rechenzentrum Erlangen, Germany

Abstract:
We present a pipelined wavefront parallelization approach for stencil-based computations. Within a fixed spatial
domain successive wavefronts are executed by threads scheduled to a multicore processor chip with a shared outer
level cache. By re-using data from cache in the successive wavefronts this multicore-aware parallelization strategy
employs temporal blocking in a simple and efficient way. We use the Jacobi algorithm in three dimensions as a
prototype for stencil-based computations and prove the efficiency of our approach on the latest generations of Intel’s
x86 quad- and hexa-core processors.

Host of Seminar:
Harvey Wasserman