Improving ocean modeling software NEMO 4.0 benchmarking and communication efficiency

Abstract

Communications in distributed memory supercomputers are still limiting scalability of geophysical models. Considering the recent trends of the semiconductor industry, we think this problem is here to stay. We present the optimizations that have been implemented in the 4.0 version of the ocean model NEMO to improve its scalability. Thanks to the collaboration of oceanographers and HPC experts, we identified and removed the unnecessary communications in two bottleneck routines, the computation of free surface pressure gradient, and the forcing in the straight or unstructured open boundaries. Since a wrong parallel decomposition choice could undermine computing performance, we impose its automatic definition in all cases, including when subdomains containing land points only are excluded from the decomposition. For a smaller audience of developers and vendors, we propose a new benchmark configuration, which is easy to use while offering the full complexity of operational versions.