Performance of the Shallow Water Equations on the Suprenum-1 Parallel Supercomputer

We describe the implementation of a fluid dynamical benchmark on the 256 node SUPRENUM-1 parallel computer. The benchmark, the Shallow Water Equations, is frequently used as a model for both oceanographic and atmospheric circulation. We describe the steps involved in implementing the algorithm on the SUPRENUM-1 and we provide details of performance. We have measured 4.95 Mflops (64-bit arithmetic) for single node performance, and 1200 Mflops aggregate performance with 256 nodes, at efficiencies up to 96%. This compares well with vector and MIMD supercomputers. Performance of 1530 Mflops was measured for the same algorithm on the CRAY YMP/8, and 543 Mflops was measured on the 128-node Intel iPSC/860. The SIMD Thinking Machines CM-200 delivers 5.25 Gflops (64-bit) and 8.09 Gflops (32-bit) for the benchmark. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh * Research supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, under grant AFOSR-89-0422