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NEMO HPC

Working group leader (and responsible for wiki pages) : Sébastien Masson.

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Members of the Working group:

• Sébastien Masson
• Italo Epicoco
• Silvia Mocavero
• Marie-Alice Foujols
• Jason Holt
• Gurvan Madec
• Mondher Chekki

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Objectives:

• make short term recommendations for improving the performance of the existing system
• propose criteria for a taking decisions at Gateway 2025 regarding HPC.
• provide more detail on Gung-Ho (esp. regarding its implications for mesh discretization)
• identify other possible strategies and approaches for evolutions in the long term.
• define a simple configuration (with IO and complex geometry) that will serve as a proof of concept for validating the proposed approach for the future system.

Some ideas...:

A strong improvement of NEMO scalability is needed to be able to take advantage of the new machines. This means a deep review/rewrite of NEMO code at some point in the futur (beyond 5 years). At the same time, we already know that CMIP7 won't use an ocean model that has not been strongly tested and validated and will stick to a NEMO model close to the existing one.
This means that we need to:

1) keep improving the current structure of NEMO so it works quite efficiently for almost 10 more years (until the end of CMPI7).
2) start to work on a new structure that would be tested from year 5 and fully tested and validated for CMIP8 in about 10 years.

Based on this, we propose to divide the work according to 3 temporal window

0-3 years: improvements with existing code: Do basic optimisation work:

1) reduce the number of communications: remove useless communications (a lot), do less and bigger communications (group communications, use large halo)
2) check code vectorization (AVX instructions for example)
3) reduce computations over halo (avoid systematic computation from 1 to jpi)

0-5 years: improvements through the introduction of OpenMP:

work initialed by CMCC. "Basic" implementation such as tiling may be efficient with many cores processors? test different way to find new sources of parallelism.

beyond 5 years:

GungHo? or not GungHo?, that is the question...

Agenda:

For the next 2 years, as a start, a workshop to be organized in 2015 on “NEMO in 2025 : routes toward multi-resolution approaches”.