When Fewer Cores Is Faster: A Parametric Study of Undersubscription in High-Performance Computing

In the world of high-performance computing, it is known that it can be beneficial to leave a small number of CPU cores unused, a practice termed undersubscription. However, undersubscription is rarely implemented in scientific applications of high-performance computing. We demonstrate the importance of calibrated undersubscription in Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations through the aggregated results of 1844 benchmarks. These benchmarks measured three hardware configurations and five different CFD models. On average, performance increased by 14