Porting the MPI-parallelized LES model PALM to multi-GPU systems and many integrated core processors: an experience report
accepted for publication
- The computational power and availability of graphics processing units (GPUs), such as the Nvidia Tesla, and Many Integrated Core (MIC) processors, such as the Intel Xeon Phi, on high performance computing (HPC) systems is rapidly evolving. However, HPC applications need to be ported to take advantage of such hardware. This paper is a report on our experience of porting the MPI+OpenMP parallelised large-eddy simulation model (PALM) to multi-GPU as well as to MIC processor environments using the directive-based high level programming paradigm OpenACC and OpenMP, respectively. PALM is a Fortran-based computational fluid dynamics software package, used for the simulation of atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers to answer questions linked to fundamental atmospheric turbulence research, urban modelling, aircraft safety and cloud physics. Development of PALM started in 1997, the project currently entails 140 kLOC and is used on HPC farms of up to 43,200 cores. The main challenges we faced during the porting process are the size and complexity of the PALM code base, its inconsistent modularisation and the complete lack of a unit-test suite. We report the methods used to identify performance issues as well as our experiences with state-of-the-art profiling tools. Moreover, we outline the required porting steps in order to properly execute our code on GPUs and MIC processors, describe the problems and bottlenecks that we encountered during the porting process, and present separate performance tests for both architectures. These performance tests, however, do not provide any benchmark information that compares the performance of the ported code between the two architectures.
Author: | Helge Knoop, Tobias Gronemeier, Matthias Sühring, Peter Steinbach, Matthias NoackORCiD, Florian WendeORCiD, Thomas Steinke, Christoph Knigge, Siegfried Raasch, Klaus Ketelsen |
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Document Type: | Article |
Parent Title (English): | International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering. Special Issue on: Novel Strategies for Programming Accelerators |
Publisher: | Inderscience |
Year of first publication: | 2017 |
Related Identifier: | https://doi.org/10.1504/IJCSE.2017.10011396 |