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Scientific computing is used frequently in an increasing number of disciplines to accelerate scientific discovery. Many such computing problems involve the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDE). In this thesis we explore and develop methodology for high-performance implementations of PDE solvers for shared-memory multiprocessor architectures.

We consider three realistic PDE settings: solution of the Maxwell equations in 3D using an unstructured grid and the method of conjugate gradients, solution of the Poisson equation in 3D using a geometric multigrid method, and solution of an advection equation in 2D using structured adaptive mesh refinement. We apply software optimization techniques to increase both parallel efficiency and the degree of data locality.

In our evaluation we use several different shared-memory architectures ranging from symmetric multiprocessors and distributed shared-memory architectures to chip-multiprocessors. For distributed shared-memory systems we explore methods of data distribution to increase the amount of geographical locality. We evaluate automatic and transparent page migration based on runtime sampling, user-initiated page migration using a directive with an affinity-on-next-touch semantic, and algorithmic optimizations for page-placement policies.

Our results show that page migration increases the amount of geographical locality and that the parallel overhead related to page migration can be amortized over the iterations needed to reach convergence. This is especially true for the affinity-on-next-touch methodology whereby page migration can be initiated at an early stage in the algorithms.

We also develop and explore methodology for other forms of data locality and conclude that the effect on performance is significant and that this effect will increase for future shared-memory architectures. Our overall conclusion is that, if the involved locality issues are addressed, the shared-memory programming model provides an efficient and productive environment for solving many important PDE problems.

A trend in parallel computer architecture is that systems with a large shared memory are becoming more and more popular. A shared memory system can be either a uniform memory architecture (UMA) or a cache coherent non-uniform memory architecture (cc-NUMA).

In the present thesis, the performance of parallel PDE solvers on cc-NUMA computers is studied. In particular, we consider the shared namespace programming model, represented by OpenMP. Since the main memory is physically, or geographically distributed over several multi-processor nodes, the latency for local memory accesses is smaller than for remote accesses. Therefore, the geographical locality of the data becomes important.

The focus of the present thesis is to study multithreaded PDE solvers on cc-NUMA systems, in particular their memory access pattern with respect to geographical locality. The questions posed are: (1) How large is the influence on performance of the non-uniformity of the memory system? (2) How should a program be written in order to reduce this influence? (3) Is it possible to introduce optimizations in the computer system for this purpose?

The main conclusion is that geographical locality is important for performance on cc-NUMA systems. This is shown experimentally for a broad range of PDE solvers as well as theoretically using a model involving characteristics of computer systems and applications.

Geographical locality can be achieved through migration directives that are inserted by the programmer or — possibly in the future — automatically by the compiler. On some systems, it can also be accomplished by means of transparent, hardware initiated migration and replication. However, a necessary condition that must be fulfilled if migration is to be effective is that the memory access pattern must not be "speckled", i.e. as few threads as possible shall make accesses to each memory page.

We also conclude that OpenMP is competitive with MPI on cc-NUMA systems if care is taken to get a favourable data distribution.