Geoscientific Model Development (Feb 2014)

A distributed computing approach to improve the performance of the Parallel Ocean Program (v2.1)

  • B. van Werkhoven,
  • J. Maassen,
  • M. Kliphuis,
  • H. A. Dijkstra,
  • S. E. Brunnabend,
  • M. van Meersbergen,
  • F. J. Seinstra,
  • H. E. Bal

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-267-2014
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 267 – 281

Abstract

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The Parallel Ocean Program (POP) is used in many strongly eddying ocean circulation simulations. Ideally it would be desirable to be able to do thousand-year-long simulations, but the current performance of POP prohibits these types of simulations. In this work, using a new distributed computing approach, two methods to improve the performance of POP are presented. The first is a block-partitioning scheme for the optimization of the load balancing of POP such that it can be run efficiently in a multi-platform setting. The second is the implementation of part of the POP model code on graphics processing units (GPUs). We show that the combination of both innovations also leads to a substantial performance increase when running POP simultaneously over multiple computational platforms.