event
Thursday 10 Oct 2019: LFRic and PSyclone: Towards the Next Generation Modelling Systems
Dr Iva Kavcic - Met Office
Harrison 101 14:30-16:30
LFRic is the new weather and climate modelling system being developed by the UK Met Office to replace the existing Unified Model in preparation for exascale computing in the 2020s. LFRic uses the GungHo dynamical core and runs on a semi-structured cubed-sphere mesh.
The design of the supporting infrastructure follows object-oriented principles to facilitate modularity and the use of external libraries. One of the guiding design principles, imposed to promote performance portability, is “separation of concerns” between the science code and parallel code. An application called PSyclone, developed at the STFC Hartree Centre, can generate the parallel code enabling deployment of a single source science code onto different machine architectures.
PSyclone is a domain-specific compiler and source-to-source translator developed for use in finite element, finite volume and finite difference codes. Using the information from a supported API, PSyclone generates code exploiting different parallel programming models.
This seminar will first give an overview of LFRic and its origins, the GungHo project, with the scientific requirements for the new dynamical core and how they reflect to design of the software infrastructure. After that the PSyclone functionality with its main concepts and support for specific models through its APIs will be presented, with the particular focus on PSyclone API for LFRic as well as examples of PSyclone usage and LFRic performance results.
