7.2. Measuring performance

Before trying to make your simulation run faster, you should understand how it currently performs and where the bottlenecks are.

The best way to do this is run the your system (actual number of atoms) for a modest number of timesteps (say 100 steps) on several different processor counts, including a single processor if possible. Do this for an equilibrium version of your system, so that the 100-step timings are representative of a much longer run. There is typically no need to run for 1000s of timesteps to get accurate timings; you can simply extrapolate from short runs.

For the set of runs, look at the timing data printed to the screen and log file at the end of each LAMMPS run. The screen and logfile output page gives an overview.

Running on one (or a few processors) should give a good estimate of the serial performance and what portions of the timestep are taking the most time. Running the same problem on a few different processor counts should give an estimate of parallel scalability. I.e. if the simulation runs 16x faster on 16 processors, its 100% parallel efficient; if it runs 8x faster on 16 processors, it’s 50% efficient.

The most important data to look at in the timing info is the timing breakdown and relative percentages. For example, trying different options for speeding up the long-range solvers will have little impact if they only consume 10% of the run time. If the pairwise time is dominating, you may want to look at GPU or OMP versions of the pair style, as discussed below. Comparing how the percentages change as you increase the processor count gives you a sense of how different operations within the timestep are scaling. Note that if you are running with a Kspace solver, there is additional output on the breakdown of the Kspace time. For PPPM, this includes the fraction spent on FFTs, which can be communication intensive.

Another important detail in the timing info are the histograms of atoms counts and neighbor counts. If these vary widely across processors, you have a load-imbalance issue. This often results in inaccurate relative timing data, because processors have to wait when communication occurs for other processors to catch up. Thus the reported times for “Communication” or “Other” may be higher than they really are, due to load-imbalance. If this is an issue, you can uncomment the MPI_Barrier() lines in src/timer.cpp, and re-compile LAMMPS, to obtain synchronized timings.