Parallelism in Firedrake¶

Firedrake uses MPI for distributed memory parallelism. This is carried out transparently as long as your usage of Firedrake is only through the public API. To run your code in parallel you need you use the MPI job launcher available on your system. Often this program is called mpiexec. For example, to run a simulation in a file named simulation.py on 16 processes we might use.

mpiexec -n 16 python simulation.py


Printing in parallel¶

The MPI execution model is that of single program, multiple data. As a result, printing output requires a little bit of care: just using print() will result in every process producing output. A sensible approach is to use PETSc’s printing facilities to handle this, as covered in this short demo.

Expected performance improvements¶

Without detailed analysis, it is difficult to say precisely how much performance improvement should be expected from running in parallel. As a rule of thumb, it is worthwhile adding more processes as long as the number of degrees of freedom per process is more than around 50000. This is explored in some depth in the main Firedrake paper. Additionally, most of the finite element calculations performed by Firedrake are limited by the memory bandwidth of the machine. You can measure how the achieved memory bandwidth changes depending on the number of processes used on your machine using STREAMS.

Using MPI Communicators¶

By default, Firedrake parallelises across MPI_COMM_WORLD. If you want to perform a simulation in which different subsets of processes perform different computations (perhaps solving the same PDE for multiple different initial conditions), this can be achieved by using sub-communicators. The mechanism to do so is to provide a communicator when building the Mesh() you will perform the simulation on, using the optional comm keyword argument. All subsequent operations using that mesh are then only collective over the supplied communicator, rather than MPI_COMM_WORLD. For example, to split the global communicator into two and perform two different simulations on the two halves we would write.

from firedrake import *

comm = COMM_WORLD.Split(COMM_WORLD.rank % 2)

if COMM_WORLD.rank % 2 == 0:
# Even ranks create a quad mesh
mesh = UnitSquareMesh(N, N, quadrilateral=True, comm=comm)
else:
# Odd ranks create a triangular mesh
mesh = UnitSquareMesh(N, N, comm=comm)

...


To access the communicator a mesh was created on, we can use the comm property, or the function mpi_comm().

Ensemble parallelism¶

Ensemble parallelism means solving simultaneous copies of a model with different coefficients, RHS or initial data, in situations that require communication between the copies. Use cases include ensemble data assimilation, uncertainty quantification, and time parallelism.

In ensemble parallelism, we split the MPI communicator into a number of subcommunicators, each of which we refer to as an ensemble member. Within each ensemble member, existing Firedrake functionality allows us to specify the FE problem solves which use spatial parallelism across the subcommunicator in the usual way. Another set of subcommunicators then allow communication between ensemble members.

Spatial and ensemble paralellism for an ensemble with 5 members, each of which is executed in parallel over 5 processors.

The additional functionality required to support ensemble parallelism is the ability to send instances of Function from one ensemble to another. This is handled by the Ensemble class. Instantiating an ensemble requires a communicator (usually MPI_COMM_WORLD) plus the number of independent simulations making up the ensemble (5, in the case of the example below). Each ensemble member will have the same spatial parallelism with the number of ranks in each spatial communicator given by dividing the size of the original communicator the number of ensemble members. The total number of processes launched by mpiexec must therefore be equal to the product of number of ensemble members with the number of processes to be used for each ensemble member.

from firedrake import *

my_ensemble = Ensemble(COMM_WORLD, 5)


Then, the spatial sub-communicator must be passed to Mesh() (or via inbuilt mesh generators in utility_meshes), so that it will then be used by function spaces and functions derived from the mesh.

mesh = UnitSquareMesh(20, 20, comm=my_ensemble.comm)
x, y = SpatialCoordinate(mesh)
V = FunctionSpace(mesh, "CG", 1)
u = Function(V)


The ensemble sub-communicator is then available through the method ensemble_comm.

q = Constant(my_ensemble.ensemble_comm.rank + 1)
u.interpolate(sin(q*pi*x)*cos(q*pi*y))


MPI communications across the spatial sub-communicator (i.e., within an ensemble member) are handled automatically by Firedrake, whilst MPI communications across the ensemble sub-communicator (i.e., between ensemble members) are handled through methods of Ensemble. Currently only global reductions are supported.

my_ensemble.allreduce(u, usum)


Other forms of MPI communication (send(), recv(), isend(), irecv()) are specified but not currently implemented.