Dear all,
I use ngsolve to solve for eigenvalues/functions of 2D Helmholtz equations in an electrodynamics context. For my problem, I need to find a large number of such eigenvalues and eigenvectors (on the order of thousands). As a starting point I took the PML-Tutorial (1.7.1 Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) — NGS-Py 6.2.2302 documentation) and adapted it according to my needs. In principle, this works fine and the results nicely coincide with analytical solutions, where available.
The problem: Calculating many eigenvalues/vectors is, of course, computationally expensive as the grid has to be chosen very fine. Therefore, I tried to run the modified PML Code on the a HPC cluster (on VSC4). I realized, however, that with larger number of available cpu cores, the code actually got slower. Upon closer analysis, I found that this issue relates to the usage of the ‘with TaskManager():’ parallel computing environment and can already be reproduced on my Laptop (which has a AMD 16 logical core CPU). Instead of accelerating the computation, the TaskManager() seems to result in longer runtimes, interestingly along with higher CPU usage. On my device, I can already see the effect using the PML-Tutorial (unfortunately, the forum’s attachement function seems not to work for me atm, so I just add the code I modified in this very tutorial).
With the TaskManager() this takes 1.7 s:
u = GridFunction(fes, multidim=50, name=‘resonances’)
with TaskManager():
lam = ArnoldiSolver(a.mat, m.mat, fes.FreeDofs(),
u.vecs, shift=400)
Without the TaskManager() this takes 0.9 s:
u = GridFunction(fes, multidim=50, name=‘resonances’)
lam = ArnoldiSolver(a.mat, m.mat, fes.FreeDofs(),
u.vecs, shift=400)
Is there a workaround to get a performance boost from the usage of several cpu cores? Also I’m happy about general suggestions to increase the performance when computing several thousands of eigenvectors/values with ngsolve.
I’d appreciate any suggestions.
All the best,
Oliver 