Towards a real-time modeling of global ocean waves by the fully GPU-accelerated spectral wave model WAM6-GPU v1.0

Abstract

The spectral wave model WAM (Cycle 6) is a commonly used code package for ocean wave forecasting. However, it is still a challenge to include it into the long-term Earth system modeling due to the huge computing requirement. In this study, we have successfully developed a GPU-accelerated version of the WAM model that can run all its computing-demanding components on GPUs, with a significant performance increase compared with its original CPU version. The power of GPU computing has been unleashed through substantial efforts of code refactoring, which reduces the computing time of a 7 d global 1/10° wave modeling to only 7.6 min in a single-node server installed with eight NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Speedup comparisons exhibit that running the WAM6 with eight cards can achieve the maximum speedup ratio of 37 over the dual-socket CPU node with two Intel Xeon 6236 CPUs. The study provides an approach to energy-efficient computing for ocean wave modeling. A preliminary evaluation suggests that approximately 90 % of power can be saved.