Evaluation of the scalability property of the program for the simulation of atmospheric chemical transport by means of the simulator gem5

In this work we have developed a new efficient program for the numerical simulation of 3D global chemical transport on an adaptive finite-difference grid which allows us to concentrate grid points in the regions where flow variables sharply change and coarsen the grid in the regions of their smooth behavior, which significantly minimizes the grid size. We represent the adaptive grid with a combination of several dynamic (tree, linked list) and static (array) data structures. The dynamic data structures are used for a grid reconstruction, and the calculations of the flow variables are based on the static data structures. The introduction of the static data structures allows us to speed up the program by a factor of 2 in comparison with the conventional approach to the grid representation with only dynamic data structures.
We wrote and tested our program on a computer with 6 CPU cores. Using the computer microarchitecture simulator gem5, we estimated the scalability property of the program on a significantly greater number of cores (up to 32), using several models of a computer system with the design “computational cores–cache–main memory”. It has been shown that the microarchitecture of a computer system has a significant impact on the scalability property, i.e. the same program demonstrates different efficiency on different computer microarchitectures. For example, we have a speedup of 14.2 on a processor with 32 cores and 2 cache levels, but we have a speedup of 22.2 on a processor with 32 cores and 3 cache levels. The execution time of a program on a computer model in gem5 is 104–105 times greater than the execution time of the same program on a real computer and equals 1.5 hours for the most complex model.
Also in this work we describe how to configure gem5 and how to perform simulations with gem5 in the most optimal way.