Oksana Guba

CAM-SE: A scalable spectral element dynamical core for the Community Atmosphere Model

The Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) version 5 includes a spectral element dynamical core option from NCAR’s High-Order Method Modeling Environment. It is a continuous Galerkin spectral finite-element method designed for fully unstructured quadrilateral meshes. The current configurations in CAM are based on the cubed-sphere grid. The main motivation for including a spectral element dynamical core is to improve the scalability of CAM by allowing quasi-uniform grids for the sphere that do not require polar filters. In addition, the approach provides other state-of-the-art capabilities such as improved conservation properties. Spectral elements are used for the horizontal discretization, while most other aspects of the dynamical core are a hybrid of well-tested techniques from CAM’s finite volume and global spectral dynamical core options. Here we first give an overview of the spectral element dynamical core as used in CAM. We then give scalability and performance results from CAM running with three different dynamical core options within the Community Earth System Model, using a pre-industrial time-slice configuration. We focus on high-resolution simulations, using 1/4 degree, 1/8 degree, and T341 spectral truncation horizontal grids.

Toward performance portability of the Albany finite element analysis code using the Kokkos library

Performance portability on heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) systems is a major challenge faced today by code developers: parallel code needs to be executed correctly as well as with high performance on machines with different architectures, operating systems, and software libraries. The finite element method (FEM) is a popular and flexible method for discretizing partial differential equations arising in a wide variety of scientific, engineering, and industrial applications that require HPC. This article presents some preliminary results pertaining to our development of a performance portable implementation of the FEM-based Albany code. Performance portability is achieved using the Kokkos library. We present performance results for the Aeras global atmosphere dynamical core module in Albany. Numerical experiments show that our single code implementation gives reasonable performance across three multicore/many-core architectures: NVIDIA General Processing Units (GPU’s), Intel Xeon Phis, and multicore CPUs.