Semi-stencil swMATH ID: 12894 Software Authors: de la Cruz, Raúl; Araya-Polo, Mauricio Description: Algorithm 942: Semi-stencil. Finite Difference (FD) is a widely used method to solve Partial Differential Equations (PDE). PDEs are the core of many simulations in different scientific fields, such as geophysics, astrophysics, etc. The typical FD solver performs stencil computations for the entire computational domain, thus solving the differential operators. In general terms, the stencil computation consists of a weighted accumulation of the contribution of neighbor points along the cartesian axis. Therefore, optimizing stencil computations is crucial in reducing the application execution time.Stencil computation performance is bounded by two main factors: the memory access pattern and the inefficient reuse of the accessed data. We propose a novel algorithm, named Semi-stencil, that tackles these two problems. The main idea behind this algorithm is to change the way in which the stencil computation progresses within the computational domain. Instead of accessing all required neighbors and adding all their contributions at once, the Semi-stencil algorithm divides the computation into several updates. Then, each update gathers half of the axis neighbors, partially computing at the same time the stencil in a set of closely located points. As Semi-stencil progresses through the domain, the stencil computations are completed on precomputed points. This computation strategy improves the memory access pattern and efficiently reuses the accessed data.{par}Our initial target architecture was the Cell/B.E., where the Semi-stencil in a SPE was 44 Homepage: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2591006 Keywords: HPC; Semi-stencil; stencil computation; blocking; cache oblivious; code optimization; numerical algorithms; performance model; time skewing Related Software: PAPI; likwid; OCTOPUS; Chombo Cited in: 1 Document Cited by 2 Authors 1 Araya-Polo, Mauricio 1 de la Cruz, Raúl Cited in 1 Serial 1 ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software Cited in 1 Field 1 Numerical analysis (65-XX) Citations by Year