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 o f two floating-point-intensive engineering applications from Boeing's high performance computing benchmark suite (BHPCBS) on emerging RISC parallel sy stems and PC clusters. The first application is a computational fluid dynam ics (CFD) code, OVERFLOW, developed by NASA. and used by Boeing for analysi s 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 o f both applications use the message passing interface (MPI) standard for me ssage 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 a ble to meet Boeing's computing requirements in the future. We describe the test environments for the studies, discuss parallelization issues and strat egies and present performance data for the two applications. (C) 2001 Elsev ier Science B.V. All rights reserved.