Performance, Intel MKL and multithreading
Updated April 26, 2021
flow5 vs. xflr5
The analysis times in flow5 have been greatly reduced with the use of Intel's MKL library and with multithreading. This in turn allows the use of higher mesh sizes. The following chart shows the improvement when running on an Intel Core i5@2.50GHz.
Back to top
flow5 on macOS
The benefits are similar on a low-end aging macOS. The macMini 2014 platform was limited to 4Gb RAM, so that memory issues limited the benchmark to matrix sizes no greater than 10000.
The MKL librairies have been replaced by the macOS native vecLib framework starting with v7.03, with comparable performance.
flow5 runs smoothly on macOS mini M1 with the Rosetta 2 translator, with good performance.
Back to top
flow5 on different CPU
The analysis times diminish with the processor's speed and number of threads as shown in the graph below.
It is to be noted that Intel's MKL library is specifically optimized for Intel processors, as it should be, so that the benefit on an AMD processor is not quite as significant as could have been expected given the number of cores. The improvement is still significant nonetheless.
The model used to perform the testing can be downloaded here: LU_test.fl5.
Back to top