Performance Optimizations via Connect-IB and Dynamically Connected Transport Service for Maximum Performance on LS-DYNA®

From concept to engineering, and from design to test and manufacturing, the automotive industry relies on powerful virtual development solutions. CFD and crash simulations are performed in an effort to secure quality and accelerate the development process. LS-DYNA® relies on Message Passing Interface (MPI) for cluster or node-to- node communications, the de-facto messaging library for high performance clusters. MPI relies on fast server and storage interconnect in order to provide low latency and high messaging rate. The more complex simulation being performed to better simulate the physical model behavior, the higher the performance demands from the cluster interconnect are. The recently launched Mellanox Connect-IBTM InfiniBand adapter introduced a novel high-performance and scalable architecture for high-performance clusters. The architecture was designed from the ground up to provide high performance and scalability for the largest supercomputers in the world, today and in the future. The device includes a new network transport mechanism called Dynamically Connected TransportTM Service (DCT), which was invented to provide a Reliable Connection Transport mechanism — the service that provides many of InfiniBand’s advanced capabilities such as RDMA, large message sends, and low latency kernel bypass — at an unlimited cluster size. The paper will review the novel Connect-IB architecture, the new transport service, and their performance effect on LS-DYNA simulations.