Feltor is a modular and free scientific software package. It allows
developing platform independent code that runs on a variety of parallel
computer architectures ranging from laptop CPUs to multi-GPU distributed memory
systems. Feltor consists of both a numerical library and a collection of
application codes built on top of the library. Its main target are two- and
three-dimensional drift- and gyro-fluid simulations with discontinuous Galerkin
methods as the main numerical discretization technique. We observe that
numerical simulations of a recently developed gyro-fluid model produce
non-deterministic results in parallel computations. First, we show how we
restore accuracy and bitwise reproducibility algorithmically and
programmatically. In particular, we adopt an implementation of the exactly
rounded dot product based on long accumulators, which avoids accuracy losses
especially in parallel applications. However, reproducibility and accuracy
alone fail to indicate correct simulation behaviour. In fact, in the physical
model slightly different initial conditions lead to vastly different end
states. This behaviour translates to its numerical representation. Pointwise
convergence, even in principle, becomes impossible for long simulation times.
In a second part, we explore important performance tuning considerations. We
identify latency and memory bandwidth as the main performance indicators of our
routines. Based on these, we propose a parallel performance model that predicts
the execution time of algorithms implemented in Feltor and test our model on a
selection of parallel hardware architectures. We are able to predict the
execution time with a relative error of less than 25% for problem sizes between
0.1 and 1000 MB. Finally, we find that the product of latency and bandwidth
gives a minimum array size per compute node to achieve a scaling efficiency
above 50% (both strong and weak)
