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Worley, Patrick H

Publications and source records attributed to Worley, Patrick H.

Communication Characterization and Optimization of Applications Using Topology-Aware Task Mapping on Large Supercomputers

On large supercomputers, the job scheduling systems may assign a non-contiguous node allocation for user applications depending on available resources. With parallel applications using MPI (Message Passing Interface), the default process ordering does not take into account the actual physical node layout available to the application. This contributes to non-locality in terms of physical network topology and impacts communication performance of the application. In order to mitigate such performance penalties, this work describes techniques to identify suitable task mapping that takes the layout of the allocated nodes as well as the application's communication behavior into account. During the first phase of this research, we instrumented and collected performance data to characterize communication behavior of critical US DOE (United States - Department of Energy) applications using an augmented version of the mpiP tool. Subsequently, we developed several reordering methods (spectral bisection, neighbor join tree etc.) to combine node layout and application communication data for optimized task placement. We developed a tool called mpiAproxy to facilitate detailed evaluation of the various reordering algorithms without requiring full application executions. This work presents a comprehensive performance evaluation (14,000 experiments) of the various task mapping techniques in lowering communication costs on Titan, the leadership class supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Sreepathi, Sarat↗

Balancing Particle and Mesh Computation in a Particle-In-Cell Code

The XGC1 plasma microturbulence particle-in-cell simulation code has both particle-based and mesh-based computational kernels that dominate performance. Both of these are subject to load imbalances that can degrade performance and that evolve during a simulation. Each separately can be addressed adequately, but optimizing just for one can introduce significant load imbalances in the other, degrading overall performance. A technique has been developed based on Golden Section Search that minimizes wallclock time given prior information on wallclock time, and on current particle distribution and mesh cost per cell, and also adapts to evolution in load imbalance in both particle and mesh work. In problems of interest this doubled the performance on full system runs on the XK7 at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility compared to load balancing only one of the kernels.

Worley, Patrick H↗

Climate Science Performance, Data and Productivity on Titan

Climate Science models are flagship codes for the largest of high performance computing (HPC) resources, both in visibility, with the newly launched Department of Energy (DOE) Accelerated Climate Model for Energy (ACME) effort, and in terms of significant fractions of system usage. The performance of the DOE ACME model is captured with application level timers and examined through a sizeable run archive. Performance and variability of compute, queue time and ancillary services are examined. As Climate Science advances in the use of HPC resources there has been an increase in the required human and data systems to achieve programs goals. A description of current workflow processes (hardware, software, human) and planned automation of the workflow, along with historical and projected data in motion and at rest data usage, are detailed. The combination of these two topics motivates a description of future systems requirements for DOE Climate Modeling efforts, focusing on the growth of data storage and network and disk bandwidth required to handle data at an acceptable rate.

Mayer, Benjamin W↗

Improving the Performance Scalability of the Community Atmosphere Model

The Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), which serves as the atmosphere component of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), is the most computationally expensive CCSM component in typical configurations. On current and next-generation leadership class computing systems, the performance of CAM is tied to its parallel scalability. Improving performance scalability in CAM has been a challenge, due largely to algorithmic restrictions necessitated by the polar singularities in its latitude-longitude computational grid. Nevertheless, through a combination of exploiting additional parallelism, implementing improved communication protocols, and eliminating scalability bottlenecks, we have been able to more than double the maximum throughput rate of CAM on production platforms. We describe these improvements and present results on the Cray XT5 and IBM BG/P. The approaches taken are not specific to CAM and may inform similar scalability enhancement activities for other codes.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

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 a 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 of 1/4 degree, 1/8 degree, and T340 spectral truncation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

A modern solver framework to manage solution algorithms in the Community Earth System Model

Global Earth-system models (ESM) can now produce simulations that resolve ~50 km features and include finer-scale, interacting physical processes. In order to achieve these scale-length solutions, ESMs require smaller time steps, which limits parallel performance. Solution methods that overcome these bottlenecks can be quite intricate, and there is no single set of algorithms that perform well across the range of problems of interest. This creates significant implementation challenges, which is further compounded by complexity of ESMs. Therefore, prototyping and evaluating new algorithms in these models requires a software framework that is flexible, extensible, and easily introduced into the existing software. We describe our efforts to create a parallel solver framework that links the Trilinos library of solvers to Glimmer-CISM, a continental ice sheet model used in the Community Earth System Model (CESM). We demonstrate this framework within both current and developmental versions of Glimmer-CISM and provide strategies for its integration into the rest of the CESM.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Computational Performance of Ultra-High-Resolution Capability in the Community Earth System Model

With the fourth release of the Community Climate System Model, the ability to perform ultra-high resolution climate simulations is now possible, enabling eddy-resolving ocean and sea ice models to be coupled to a finite-volume atmosphere model for a range of atmospheric resolutions. This capability was made possible by enabling the model to use large scale parallelism, which required a significant refactoring of the software infrastructure. We describe the scalability of two ultra-high-resolution coupled configurations on leadership class computing platforms. We demonstrate the ability to utilize over 30,000 processor cores on a Cray XT5 system and over 60,000 cores on an IBM Blue Gene/P system to obtain climatologically relevant simulation rates for these configurations.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

The Community Climate System Model Version 4

The fourth version of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM4) was recently completed and released to the climate community. This paper describes developments to all the CCSM components, and documents fully coupled pre-industrial control runs compared to the previous version, CCSM3. Using the standard atmosphere and land resolution of 1{sup o} results in the sea surface temperature biases in the major upwelling regions being comparable to the 1.4{sup o} resolution CCSM3. Two changes to the deep convection scheme in the atmosphere component result in the CCSM4 producing El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability with a much more realistic frequency distribution than the CCSM3, although the amplitude is too large compared to observations. They also improve the representation of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, and the frequency distribution of tropical precipitation. A new overflow parameterization in the ocean component leads to an improved simulation of the deep ocean density structure, especially in the North Atlantic. Changes to the CCSM4 land component lead to a much improved annual cycle of water storage, especially in the tropics. The CCSM4 sea ice component uses much more realistic albedos than the CCSM3, and the Arctic sea ice concentration is improved in the CCSM4. An ensemble of 20th century simulations runs produce an excellent match to the observed September Arctic sea ice extent from 1979 to 2005. The CCSM4 ensemble mean increase in globally-averaged surface temperature between 1850 and 2005 is larger than the observed increase by about 0.4 C. This is consistent with the fact that the CCSM4 does not include a representation of the indirect effects of aerosols, although other factors may come into play. The CCSM4 still has significant biases, such as the mean precipitation distribution in the tropical Pacific Ocean, too much low cloud in the Arctic, and the latitudinal distributions of short-wave and long-wave cloud forcings.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

The Community Climate System Model

The community Earth System Model (CESM) is a fully coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Performance of the Community Earth System Model

The Community Earth System Model (CESM), released in June 2010, incorporates new physical process and new numerical algorithm options, significantly enhancing simulation capabilities over its predecessor, the June 2004 release of the Community Climate System Model. CESM also includes enhanced performance tuning options and performance portability capabilities. This paper describes the performance engineering aspects of the CESM and reports performance and performance scaling on both the Cray XT5 and the IBM BG/P for four representative production simulations, varying both problem size and enabled physical processes. The paper also describes preliminary performance results for high resolution simulations using over 200,000 processor cores, indicating the promise of ongoing work in numerical algorithms and where further work is required.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗