PENNANT: an unstructured mesh mini-app for advanced architecture research

This paper describes PENNANT, a mini-app that operates on general unstructured meshes (meshes with arbitrary polygons), and is designed for advanced architecture research. It contains mesh data structures and physics algorithms adapted from the Los Alamos National Laboratory radiation-hydrodynamics code FLAG and gives a sample of the typical memory access patterns of FLAG. The basic capabilities and optimization approaches of PENNANT are presented. Results are shown from sample performance experiments run on serial, multicore, and graphics processing unit implementations, giving an indication of how PENNANT can be a useful tool for studies of new architectures and programming models. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.