PERFORMANCE OF THE SHALLOW WATER EQUATIONS ON THE CM-200 and CM-5 PARALLEL SUPERCOMPUTERS

We describe the implementation of a fluid dynamical benchmark on the 2048 vector node CM-200 parallel computer and on the 1024-node CM-5 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 two Thinking Machines Corporation computers and we provide details of performance. We have measured 5.2 Gflops (64-bit arithmetic) and 8.1 Gflops (32-bit) on the CM-200 while the CM-5 delivers 22.1 Gflops (64-bit) and 24 Gflops (32-bit). For comparison, performance of 1530 Mflops was measured for the same algorithm on the CRAY Y-MP/8, and 543 Mflops was measured on the 128-node Intel iPSC/860. * Research supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, under grant AFOSR-89-0422 and by NSF Grand Challenge Applications Group grant ASC-9217394.