Hybrid MIC/CPU parallel implementation of MoM on MIC cluster for electromagnetic problems

In this paper, a Many Integrated Core Architecture (MIC) accelerated parallel method of moment (MoM) algorithm is proposed to solve electromagnetic problems in practical applications, where MIC means a kind of coprocessor or accelerator in computer systems which is used to accelerate the computation performed by Central Processing Unit (CPU). Three critical points are introduced in this paper in detail. The first one is the design of the parallel framework, which ensures that the algorithm can run on distributed memory platform with multiple nodes. The hybrid Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) programming model is designed to achieve the purposes. The second one is the out-of-core algorithm, which greatly breaks the restriction of MIC memory. The third one is the pipeline algorithm which overlaps the data movement with MIC computation. The pipeline algorithm successfully hides the communication and thus greatly enhances the performance of hybrid MIC/CPU MoM. Numerical result indicates that the proposed algorithm has good parallel efficiency and scalability, and twice faster performance when compared with the corresponding CPU algorithm.