Open discussion about the performance evaluation of the dynamic memory version of NEMO

An analysis of computational performance and a comparison of the NEMO version 3.3 and the NEMO version 3.3.1 has been carried out on IBM Power6 cluster at CMCC. The main differences between two versions are related to the memory management and the allocation of the data structures. The NEMO ver. 3.3.1 replaces the static memory array allocation with a dynamic one. This approach brings some relevant benefits, such as the run time evaluation of the best domain decomposition. On the other hand, the dynamic array allocation introduces some loss of computational performance.

Different configurations have been used for the comparison, namely: ORCA2LIM_PISCES, POMME and the Mediterranean configuration implemented at INGV (MFS16).

The detailed results are reported in the following document ​NEMO v3.3.1 performance evaluation