Performance modelling of magnetohydrodynamics codes

Performance modelling is an important tool utilised by the High Performance Computing industry to accurately predict the run-time of science applications on a variety of different architectures. Performance models aid in procurement decisions and help to highlight areas for possible code optimisations. This paper presents a performance model for a magnetohydrodynamics physics application, Lare. We demonstrate that this model is capable of accurately predicting the run-time of Lare across multiple platforms with an accuracy of 90% (for both strong and weak scaled problems). We then utilise this model to evaluate the performance of future optimisations. The model is generated using SST/macro, the machine level component of the Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST) from Sandia National Laboratories, and is validated on both a commodity cluster located at the University of Warwick and a large scale capability resource located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.