LFRic: meeting the challenges of scalability and performance portability in weather and climate models

Adams, S. V., Ford, R. W., Hambley, M., Hobson, J.M., Kavčič, I., Maynard, C. M., Melvin, T., Müller, E. H., Porter, A. R., Rezny, M., Shipway, B. J. and Wong, W. (2019) LFRic: meeting the challenges of scalability and performance portability in weather and climate models. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 132. pp. 383-396. ISSN 0743-7315 doi: 10.1016/j.jpdc.2019.02.007

Abstract/Summary

This paper describes LFRic: the new weather and climate modelling system being developed by the UK Met Office to replace the existing Unified Model in preparation for exascale computing in the 2020s. LFRic uses the GungHo dynamical core and runs on a semi-structured cubed-sphere mesh. The design of the supporting infrastructure follows object-oriented principles to facilitate modularity and the use of external libraries where possible. In particular, a `separation of concerns' between the science code and parallel code is imposed to promote performance portability. An application called PSyclone, developed at the STFC Hartree centre, can generate the parallel code enabling deployment of a single source science code onto different machine architectures. This paper provides an overview of the scientific requirement, the design of the software infrastructure, and examples of PSyclone usage. Preliminary performance results show strong scaling and an indication that hybrid MPI/OpenMP performs better than pure MPI.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/82138
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Computer Science
Publisher	Elsevier
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