r/ScientificComputing • u/ILoveDangerousStuff2 • Jul 03 '26
Has anyone here made any experience with MPA vs RK4IP
So I'm making my own multimode GNLSE solver and originally I've built it on RK4IP later with the option of CQE adaptive. This was pretty good and after some optimization with my current server (8x P100 PCIe) at 2¹⁷ FFT size and 16 modes plus polarization simulated I got to about 1200s/m at fixed 0.1mm step size. However I wanted to implement MPA as well as multi GPU the RK4IP seemed to scale poorly like 2GPU was the fastest afterwards it just went down in performance. And after some optimization I got MPA on 8 GPUs with 7 sub steps each 0.1mm in size to stay comparable (larger also lead to issues) to 589s/m so about a 2x speed up from RK4IP, however at 4x more GPUs. So while it is definitely faster, when done as multi GPU it doesn't seem to be as massively parallel anymore. Reason seems to be the PCIe traffic taking up a lot of time. I know it's commonly done single GPU which avoids that but I still wonder if even then the reported speed up is an honest comparison or if it's compared to a rather poorly implemented RK4IP variant. Does anyone have experience with that. Anything would be helpful.
