A comparison of MPI and co-array FORTRAN for large finite element variably saturated flow simulations

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to determine how well co-array FORTRAN (CAF) performs relative to Message Passing Interface (MPI) on unstructured mesh finite element groundwater modelling applications with large problem sizes and core counts. This research used almost 150 million nodes and 300 million 3-D prism elements. Results for both the Cray XE6 and Cray XC30 are given. A comparison of the ghost-node update algorithms with source code provided for both MPI and CAF is also presented.