DG-kernel: A climate benchmark on accelerated and conventional architectures

Srinath Vadlamani, Youngsung Kim, John Dennis

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

While the emergence of many-core technology from Intel and Vida has illustrated great potential, capitalizing on this potential presents considerable challenges for large scientific applications. In particular we focus on the domain of climate modeling. Climate models typically have very large code bases with over one million lines of code which makes support of multiple version of the code infeasible. Climate models are computationally very expensive which places a premium on model performance. Furthermore because of the large user base of these applications, there is a need to support a wide range of computational platforms. These three characteristics of climate modeling make it a particularly challenging application domain for which to apply accelerator technology. We describe the work to optimize and analyze a kernel benchmark developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research on Intel Xeon Phi, Intel Sandy Bridge, and Vida GPU. The DG-kernel is a gradient calculation from the discontinuous Galerkin version of the High Order Methods Model Environment. We explored several different programming paradigms, including Fortran with both OpenACC and OpenMP, F2C-ACC, and Cuda C/Fortran. We analyze low-level hardware characteristics and their impact on the performance of the DG-kernel.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2013 Extreme Scaling Workshop, XSW 2013
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages51-57
Number of pages7
ISBN (Print)9781479936915
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event2013 7th Extreme Scaling Workshop, XSW 2013 - Boulder, CO, United States
Duration: Aug 15 2013Aug 16 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2013 Extreme Scaling Workshop, XSW 2013

Conference

Conference2013 7th Extreme Scaling Workshop, XSW 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoulder, CO
Period08/15/1308/16/13

Funding

FundersFunder number
National Center for Atmospheric Research

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'DG-kernel: A climate benchmark on accelerated and conventional architectures'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this