Parallel performance of two applications in the Boeing high performance computing benchmark suite

We describe our work to evaluate the performance of the parallel versions of two floating-point-intensive engineering applications from Boeing's high performance computing benchmark suite (BHPCBS) on emerging RISC parallel systems and PC clusters. The first application is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, OVERFLOW, developed by NASA. and used by Boeing for analysis and design of advanced aircraft. The second application is a prototype of a computational electromagnetics (CEM) code, developed by Boeing and used for radar cross-section studies. The distributed memory parallel versions of both applications use the message passing interface (MPI) standard for message passing. The goal of our work was to determine whether RISC parallel systems and PC clusters, which offer high performance at low cost, may be able to meet Boeing's computing requirements in the future. We describe the test environments for the studies, discuss parallelization issues and strategies and present performance data for the two applications. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.