Fifth High Performance Computing in Oil & Gas Workshop

摘要

Bill Brantley described AMD's 'Fusion' accelerated processing unit (APU) and its 'direct connect architecture 2.0,' as a scalable design that supports up to 16 cores per CPU. The APU heralds the 'dawn' of a new era of heterogeneous computing. Owen Brazell reported on benchmarking of Schlumberger's Eclipse and FrontSim reservoir simulators running across various multi-core chips including Intel's Nehalem and AMD's Shanghai (AMD's latest 12 core Magny-Cours was not ready in time for the test). Various million cell models were ran, most showing tail-off at around 16 or 32 CPUs. The conclusion was that increasing cores per socket without an increase in memory bandwidth is no use for distributed codes. Multi-threaded codes such as FrontSim do benefit from the new architectures. Multi-core is the future and software developers will need to re-code to reap the benefits.