Title: Numerical weather model BRAMS evaluation on many-core architectures: a micro and macro vision

Authors: Eugênio Sper De Almeida; Michael Anthony Bauer; Alvaro Luiz Fazenda

Addresses: Center for Weather Forecast and Climate Studies, National Institute for Space Research, 12630-000, Cachoeira Paulista, SP, Brazil ' Department of Computer Science, Western University, London, ON N6A 5B7, Canada ' Institute of Science and Technology, Federal University of São Paulo, 12231-280, São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil

Abstract: This paper investigates the performance of a weather forecasting application (Brazilian developments on the regional atmospheric modelling system - BRAMS) on high performance computing (HPC) clusters with a multi-core architecture. We simulated atmosphere conditions over South America for 24 hours ahead using the BRAMS, aiming to understand the impact of different architectural configurations on performance and scalability. Our analyses consider execution in intra-node and inter-node configurations of a cluster with 24 cores per node. Results reveal differences in the BRAMS performance caused by interconnection. The BRAMS may get better performance by using a newer version of MPI library implementation (one-copy schema) and improving spatial resolution.

Keywords: performance evaluation; weather forecasting; regional atmospheric modelling; BRAMS; numerical weather prediction; high performance computing; HPC; meteorology; parallel processing; multicore architectures; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2016.076940

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2016 Vol.12 No.4, pp.330 - 340

Received: 16 Jul 2013
Accepted: 28 Oct 2013
Published online: 08 Jun 2016 *

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