Articles | Volume 9, issue 10
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-3605-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-3605-2016
Development and technical paper
 | 
11 Oct 2016
Development and technical paper |  | 11 Oct 2016

Coarse-grained component concurrency in Earth system modeling: parallelizing atmospheric radiative transfer in the GFDL AM3 model using the Flexible Modeling System coupling framework

V. Balaji, Rusty Benson, Bruce Wyman, and Isaac Held

Abstract. Climate models represent a large variety of processes on a variety of timescales and space scales, a canonical example of multi-physics multi-scale modeling. Current hardware trends, such as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and Many Integrated Core (MIC) chips, are based on, at best, marginal increases in clock speed, coupled with vast increases in concurrency, particularly at the fine grain. Multi-physics codes face particular challenges in achieving fine-grained concurrency, as different physics and dynamics components have different computational profiles, and universal solutions are hard to come by.

We propose here one approach for multi-physics codes. These codes are typically structured as components interacting via software frameworks. The component structure of a typical Earth system model consists of a hierarchical and recursive tree of components, each representing a different climate process or dynamical system. This recursive structure generally encompasses a modest level of concurrency at the highest level (e.g., atmosphere and ocean on different processor sets) with serial organization underneath.

We propose to extend concurrency much further by running more and more lower- and higher-level components in parallel with each other. Each component can further be parallelized on the fine grain, potentially offering a major increase in the scalability of Earth system models.

We present here first results from this approach, called coarse-grained component concurrency, or CCC. Within the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Flexible Modeling System (FMS), the atmospheric radiative transfer component has been configured to run in parallel with a composite component consisting of every other atmospheric component, including the atmospheric dynamics and all other atmospheric physics components. We will explore the algorithmic challenges involved in such an approach, and present results from such simulations. Plans to achieve even greater levels of coarse-grained concurrency by extending this approach within other components, such as the ocean, will be discussed.

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Short summary
In nature, the many processes that make up the Earth system take place simultaneously, for instance the condensation of water vapour into clouds, and the blocking of sunlight by those clouds. In computer simulations, these often take place in sequence. We demonstrate how to make these processes also execute in parallel in computer simulations. This should prove a large benefit in the new era of computing, where arithmetic does not get faster, but we can perform more of it in parallel.