Dr. Daniel Caviedes-Voullième – Performance Portability for Earth System Modeling: Who, Why, How?

Jülich Supercomputing Center, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH

Abstract

The push towards exascale computing will demand novel solutions in hardware and in scientific software. It is now very clear that exascale computing will require to harness a wide and changing  hardware landscape. Among the many challenges towards exascale, computational scientists of all scientific domains face a key issue: how to ensure that software runs efficiently and harness the capabilities of upcoming systems. Although the prevalence of GPUs in future systems is expected, still many operational software is not prepared to make efficient use of them. The challenges are manyfold, from porting large codes to new hardware,  ensuring readability and development productivity, and re-learning how to optimally operate the models. These challenges are evident and widely discussed in Earth system modelling, where concepts such a performance portability, separation-of-concerns and the study of model dwarfs are evermore relevant. In this talk, we will discuss the need for performance portability, and the ideas and developments being carried out in Earth system modelling, from the overall trends to concrete examples.