IAS Seminar "Accelerating Earth System Models with GPUs"

Speaker:

Dr. Theodoros Christoudias, The Cyprus Institute, Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC)

Abstract:

The ECHAM/MESSy Atmospheric Chemistry (EMAC) model is a numerical chemistry and climate simulation system that includes sub-models describing tropospheric and middle atmosphere processes and their interaction with oceans, land and human influences (Jöckel et al., 2006). It uses the first version of the Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy1) to link multi-institutional computer codes. The core atmospheric model is European Centre Hamburg general circulation model (ECHAM, Roeckner et al., 2006). Both the Cyprus Institute and FZJ are founding partners in the EMAC international multi-institutional consortium.

The EMAC application is a distributed memory application exclusively relying on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for parallelization. In climate simulation applications the numerical integration by chemical kinetics solvers can take up to 90% of execution time. We have created a source-to-source compiler to automatically refactor the MESSy chemical kinetics FORTRAN source code to
CUDA, suited for running on GPU accelerators. Performance evaluation shows significant achieved speedups in both the kernel execution time and node-to-node performance comparison. We also evaluate the numerical accuracy and correctness of porting to GPU.

Anyone interested is cordially invited to participate in this seminar.

Contact: Olaf Stein, JSC