Improving scalability of Earth system models through coarse-grained component concurrency – a case study with the ICON v2.6.5 modelling system

Abstract

In the era of exascale computing, machines with unprecedented computing power are available. Making efficient use of these massively parallel machines, with millions of cores, presents a new challenge. Multi-level and multi-dimensional parallelism will be needed to meet this challenge. Coarse-grained component concurrency provides an additional parallelism dimension that complements typically used parallelization methods such as domain decomposition and loop-level shared-memory approaches. While these parallelization methods are data-parallel techniques, and they decompose the data space, component concurrency is a function-parallel technique, and it decomposes the algorithmic space. This additional dimension of parallelism allows us to extend scalability beyond the limits set by established parallelization techniques. It also offers a way to maintain performance (by using more compute power) when the model complexity is increased by adding components, such as biogeochemistry or ice sheet models. Furthermore, concurrency allows each component to run on different hardware, thus leveraging the usage of heterogeneous hardware configurations. In this work we study the characteristics of component concurrency and analyse its behaviour in a general context. The analysis shows that component concurrency increases the “parallel workload”, improving the scalability under certain conditions. These generic considerations are complemented by an analysis of a specific case, namely the coarse-grained concurrency in the multi-level parallelism context of two components of the ICON modelling system: the ICON ocean model ICON-O and the marine biogeochemistry model HAMOCC. The additional computational cost incurred by the biogeochemistry module is about 3 times that of the ICON-O ocean stand alone model, and data parallelization techniques (domain decomposition and loop-level shared-memory parallelization) present a scaling limit that impedes the computational performance of the combined ICON-O–HAMOCC model. Scaling experiments, with and without concurrency, show that component concurrency extends the scaling, in cases doubling the parallel efficiency. The experiments' scaling results are in agreement with the theoretical analysis.