Abstract: In the field of scientific computing, the amount of data is increasing rapidly with the increase in the accuracy of numerical simulations. The traditional memory solution based on DRAM is difficult to expand the capacity due to the high cost. In recent years, the persistent memory technology has attracted more and more attentions and is expected to solve this problem. Persistent memory is a supplement between DRAM and SSD. Compared with DRAM, persistent memory has the advantages of large capacity and high cost performance, but its performance is relatively lower. To test the application performance of persistent memory, we evaluate the performance of Intel persistent memory for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), an important area of scientific computing. In the experiment, persistent memory adopts the most easy-to-use memory mode, the source code does not need any modification, and the test program covers memory benchmark test and 3 common CFD algorithms. The experimental results show that in the memory mode, for different CFD algorithms, compared with DRAM as main memory, the introduction of persistent memory brings some performance loss, which increases with the increase of the data size. On the other hand, the deployment of persistent memory enables a single server to support numerical simulations with extremely large size of data.

Key words: computational fluid dynamics (CFD), persistent memory, performance evaluation ,