A 65+ Gflop/s unstructured finite element simulation of chemically reacting flows on the Intel Paragon

Many scientific and engineering applications require a detailed analysis of complex systems with strongly coupled fluid flow, thermal energy transfer mass transfer and nonequilibrium chemical reactions. Here we describe the performance of a newly developed application code, SALSA, designed to simulate these complex flows on large-scale parallel machines such as the Intel Paragon. SALSA uses 3D unstructured finite element methods to model geometrically complex flow systems. Fully implicit time integration, multicomponent mass transport and general gas phase and surface species non-equilibrium chemical kinetics are employed. Using these techniques we have obtained over 65 Gflop/s on a 3D chemically reacting flow CVD problem for Silicon Carbide (SiC) deposition. This represents 46% of the peak performance of our 1904 node Intel Paragon, an outstanding computational rate in view of the required unstructured data communication