Looking Back at ESM User Forum 2020

A 20% share of the JUWELS Cluster dedicated to Earth System Modelling (ESM) has been financed by the Helmholtz Association (HGF). Researchers from all HGF institutions in the research field Earth and Environment are eligible to apply for resources on the ESM partition, together with their cooperation partners outside the HGF. Resources are primarily provided to the Helmholtz ESM project – advanced Earth System Modelling Capacity – for scientific software implementation and production runs as well as preparation of ensuing frontier simulations.

From 4 to 5 February 2020, the second ESM User Forum took place at Forschungszentrum Jülich. 31 scientists from the ESM community met at JSC to discuss issues and new developments related to the ESM partition of JUWELS and to prepare for the GPU-based JUWELS Booster, which will be installed later in 2020. This system will again feature a partition for ESM use. The first day of the ESM User Forum was dedicated to GPU usage and programming, and summarized first applications from the ESM project exploiting the existing GPU nodes on JUWELS. These nodes were also used for the hands-on session on GPU-accelerated libraries, where the group worked on the implementation of stencil operators using OpenACC, Cuda-Fortran, CUF, Python with NUMBA, and the domain-specific language GridTools.

On the second day, the focus was on pre- and post-processing of large datasets as well as I/O performance, an issue which was brought up by ESM project scientists during former workshops. During the hands-on session, the parallel performance of netCDF4 was explored and I/O optimization strategies were spotlighted. The ESM User Forum was followed on 6 February by the second project meeting of the Pilot Lab Exascale Earth System Modelling, a new Helmholtz incubator project led by JSC that aims to enable breakthroughs in ESM on future exascale computer architectures.

Contact: Dr. Olaf Stein, o.stein@fz-juelich.de

from JSC News, No. 270, 13 March 2020