Energy Analysis of a Solver Stack for Frequency-Domain Electromagnetics

High-performance computing (HPC) aims at developing models and simulations for applications in numerous scientific fields. Yet, the energy consumption of these HPC facilities currently limits their size and performance, and consequently the size of the tackled problems. The complexity of the HPC software stacks and their various optimizations makes it difficult to finely understand the energy consumption of scientific applications. To highlight this difficulty on a concrete use-case, we perform an energy and power analysis of a software stack for the simulation of frequency-domain electromagnetic wave propagation. This solver stack combines a high order finite element discretization framework of the system of three-dimensional frequency -domain Maxwell equations with an algebraic hybrid iterative-direct sparse linear solver. This analysis is conducted on the KNL-based PRACE-PCP system. Our results illustrate the difficulty in predicting how to trade energy and runtime.