A GPU-accelerated simulation of rapid intensification of a tropical cyclone with observed heating

Abstract

This paper presents a limited-area atmospheric simulation of a tropical cyclone accelerated using GPUs. The OpenACC directive-based programming model is used to port the atmospheric model to the GPU. The GPU implementation of the main functions and kernels is discussed. The GPU-accelerated code produces high-fidelity simulations of a realistic tropical cyclone forced by observational latent heating. Performance tests show that the GPU-accelerated code yields energy-efficient simulations and scales well in both the strong and weak limit.