Articles | Volume 9, issue 11
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-4209-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-4209-2016
Development and technical paper
 | 
22 Nov 2016
Development and technical paper |  | 22 Nov 2016

P-CSI v1.0, an accelerated barotropic solver for the high-resolution ocean model component in the Community Earth System Model v2.0

Xiaomeng Huang, Qiang Tang, Yuheng Tseng, Yong Hu, Allison H. Baker, Frank O. Bryan, John Dennis, Haohuan Fu, and Guangwen Yang

Abstract. In the Community Earth System Model (CESM), the ocean model is computationally expensive for high-resolution grids and is often the least scalable component for high-resolution production experiments. The major bottleneck is that the barotropic solver scales poorly at high core counts. We design a new barotropic solver to accelerate the high-resolution ocean simulation. The novel solver adopts a Chebyshev-type iterative method to reduce the global communication cost in conjunction with an effective block preconditioner to further reduce the iterations. The algorithm and its computational complexity are theoretically analyzed and compared with other existing methods. We confirm the significant reduction of the global communication time with a competitive convergence rate using a series of idealized tests. Numerical experiments using the CESM 0.1° global ocean model show that the proposed approach results in a factor of 1.7 speed-up over the original method with no loss of accuracy, achieving 10.5 simulated years per wall-clock day on 16 875 cores.

Download
Short summary
Refining model resolution is helpful for representing climate processes. With resolution increasing, the computational cost will become very huge. We designed a new solver to accelerate the high-resolution ocean simulation so as to reduce the computational cost and make full use of the computing resource of supercomputers. Our results show that the simulation speed of the improved ocean component with 0.1° resolution achieves 10.5 simulated years per wall-clock day on 16875 CPU cores.