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A framework to evaluate IMEX schemes for atmospheric models

Geoscientific Model Development

Guba, Oksana G.; Taylor, Mark A.; Bradley, Andrew M.; Bosler, Peter A.; Steyer, Andrew S.

We present a new evaluation framework for implicit and explicit (IMEX) Runge-Kutta time-stepping schemes. The new framework uses a linearized nonhydrostatic system of normal modes. We utilize the framework to investigate the stability of IMEX methods and their dispersion and dissipation of gravity, Rossby, and acoustic waves. We test the new framework on a variety of IMEX schemes and use it to develop and analyze a set of second-order low-storage IMEX Runge-Kutta methods with a high Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) number. We show that the new framework is more selective than the 2-D acoustic system previously used in the literature. Schemes that are stable for the 2-D acoustic system are not stable for the system of normal modes.

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A new algorithm for computing multivariate Gauss-like quadrature points

Taylor, Mark A.

The diagonal-mass-matrix spectral element method has proven very successful in geophysical applications dominated by wave propagation. For these problems, the ability to run fully explicit time stepping schemes at relatively high order makes the method more competitive then finite element methods which require the inversion of a mass matrix. The method relies on Gauss-Lobatto points to be successful, since the grid points used are required to produce well conditioned polynomial interpolants, and be high quality 'Gauss-like' quadrature points that exactly integrate a space of polynomials of higher dimension than the number of quadrature points. These two requirements have traditionally limited the diagonal-mass-matrix spectral element method to use square or quadrilateral elements, where tensor products of Gauss-Lobatto points can be used. In non-tensor product domains such as the triangle, both optimal interpolation points and Gauss-like quadrature points are difficult to construct and there are few analytic results. To extend the diagonal-mass-matrix spectral element method to (for example) triangular elements, one must find appropriate points numerically. One successful approach has been to perform numerical searches for high quality interpolation points, as measured by the Lebesgue constant (Such as minimum energy electrostatic points and Fekete points). However, these points typically do not have any Gauss-like quadrature properties. In this work, we describe a new numerical method to look for Gauss-like quadrature points in the triangle, based on a previous algorithm for computing Fekete points. Performing a brute force search for such points is extremely difficult. A common strategy to increase the numerical efficiency of these searches is to reduce the number of unknowns by imposing symmetry conditions on the quadrature points. Motivated by spectral element methods, we propose a different way to reduce the number of unknowns: We look for quadrature formula that have the same number of points as the number of basis functions used in the spectral element method's transform algorithm. This is an important requirement if they are to be used in a diagonal-mass-matrix spectral element method. This restriction allows for the construction of cardinal functions (Lagrange interpolating polynomials). The ability to construct cardinal functions leads to a remarkable expression relating the variation in the quadrature weights to the variation in the quadrature points. This relation in turn leads to an analytical expression for the gradient of the quadrature error with respect to the quadrature points. Thus the quadrature weights have been completely removed from the optimization problem, and we can implement an exact steepest descent algorithm for driving the quadrature error to zero. Results from the algorithm will be presented for the triangle and the sphere.

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A performance-portable nonhydrostatic atmospheric dycore for the energy exascale earth system model running at cloud-resolving resolutions

International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC

Bertagna, Luca B.; Guba, Oksana G.; Taylor, Mark A.; Foucar, James G.; Larkin, Jeff; Bradley, Andrew M.; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran R.; Salinger, Andrew G.

We present an effort to port the nonhydrostatic atmosphere dynamical core of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) to efficiently run on a variety of architectures, including conventional CPU, many-core CPU, and GPU. We specifically target cloud-resolving resolutions of 3 km and 1 km. To express on-node parallelism we use the C++ library Kokkos, which allows us to achieve a performance portable code in a largely architecture-independent way. Our C++ implementation is at least as fast as the original Fortran implementation on IBM Power9 and Intel Knights Landing processors, proving that the code refactor did not compromise the efficiency on CPU architectures. On the other hand, when using the GPUs, our implementation is able to achieve 0.97 Simulated Years Per Day, running on the full Summit supercomputer. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most achieved to date by any global atmosphere dynamical core running at such resolutions.

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An Energy Consistent Discretization of the Nonhydrostatic Equations in Primitive Variables

Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

Taylor, Mark A.; Guba, Oksana G.; Steyer, Andrew S.; Ullrich, Paul A.; Hall, David M.; Eldred, Christopher

We derive a formulation of the nonhydrostatic equations in spherical geometry with a Lorenz staggered vertical discretization. The combination conserves a discrete energy in exact time integration when coupled with a mimetic horizontal discretization. The formulation is a version of Dubos and Tort (2014, https://doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-14-00069.1) rewritten in terms of primitive variables. It is valid for terrain following mass or height coordinates and for both Eulerian or vertically Lagrangian discretizations. The discretization relies on an extension to Simmons and Burridge (1981, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0493(1981)109<0758:AEAAMC>2.0.CO;2) vertical differencing, which we show obeys a discrete derivative product rule. This product rule allows us to simplify the treatment of the vertical transport terms. Energy conservation is obtained via a term-by-term balance in the kinetic, internal, and potential energy budgets, ensuring an energy-consistent discretization up to time truncation error with no spurious sources of energy. We demonstrate convergence with respect to time truncation error in a spectral element code with a horizontal explicit vertically implicit implicit-explicit time stepping algorithm.

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Assessing the Near-Term Risk of Climate Uncertainty:Interdependencies among the U.S. States

Backus, George A.; Trucano, Timothy G.; Robinson, David G.; Adams, Brian M.; Richards, Elizabeth H.; Siirola, John D.; Boslough, Mark B.; Taylor, Mark A.; Conrad, Stephen H.; Kelic, Andjelka; Roach, Jesse D.; Warren, Drake E.; Ballantine, Marissa D.; Stubblefield, W.A.; Snyder, Lillian A.; Finley, Ray E.; Horschel, Daniel S.; Ehlen, Mark E.; Klise, Geoffrey T.; Malczynski, Leonard A.; Stamber, Kevin L.; Tidwell, Vincent C.; Vargas, Vanessa N.; Zagonel, Aldo A.

Abstract not provided.

Climate change effects on international stability : a white paper

Boslough, Mark B.; Sprigg, James A.; Backus, George A.; Taylor, Mark A.; McNamara, Laura A.; Murphy, Kathryn M.; Malczynski, Leonard A.

This white paper represents a summary of work intended to lay the foundation for development of a climatological/agent model of climate-induced conflict. The paper combines several loosely-coupled efforts and is the final report for a four-month late-start Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project funded by the Advanced Concepts Group (ACG). The project involved contributions by many participants having diverse areas of expertise, with the common goal of learning how to tie together the physical and human causes and consequences of climate change. We performed a review of relevant literature on conflict arising from environmental scarcity. Rather than simply reviewing the previous work, we actively collected data from the referenced sources, reproduced some of the work, and explored alternative models. We used the unfolding crisis in Darfur (western Sudan) as a case study of conflict related to or triggered by climate change, and as an exercise for developing a preliminary concept map. We also outlined a plan for implementing agents in a climate model and defined a logical progression toward the ultimate goal of running both types of models simultaneously in a two-way feedback mode, where the behavior of agents influences the climate and climate change affects the agents. Finally, we offer some ''lessons learned'' in attempting to keep a diverse and geographically dispersed group working together by using Web-based collaborative tools.

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Communication-efficient property preservation in tracer transport

SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing

Bradley, Andrew M.; Bosler, Peter A.; Guba, Oksana G.; Taylor, Mark A.; Barnett, Gregory A.

Atmospheric tracer transport is a computationally demanding component of the atmospheric dynamical core of weather and climate simulations. Simulations typically have tens to hundreds of tracers. A tracer field is required to preserve several properties, including mass, shape, and tracer consistency. To improve computational efficiency, it is common to apply different spatial and temporal discretizations to the tracer transport equations than to the dynamical equations. Using different discretizations increases the difficulty of preserving properties. This paper provides a unified framework to analyze the property preservation problem and classes of algorithms to solve it. We examine the primary problem and a safety problem; describe three classes of algorithms to solve these; introduce new algorithms in two of these classes; make connections among the algorithms; analyze each algorithm in terms of correctness, bound on its solution magnitude, and its communication efficiency; and study numerical results. A new algorithm, QLT, has the smallest communication volume, and in an important case it redistributes mass approximately locally. These algorithms are only very loosely coupled to the underlying discretizations of the dynamical and tracer transport equations and thus are broadly and efficiently applicable. In addition, they may be applied to remap problems in applications other than tracer transport.

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Conforming quadrilaterals meshes on the cubed sphere

Levy, Michael N.; Overfelt, James R.; Taylor, Mark A.

The cubed sphere geometry, obtained by inscribing a cube in a sphere and mapping points between the two surfaces using a gnomonic (central) projection, is commonly used in atmospheric models because it is free of polar singularities and is well-suited for parallel computing. Global meshes on the cubed-sphere typically project uniform (square) grids from each face of the cube onto the sphere, and if refinement is desired then it is done with non-conforming meshes - overlaying the area of interest with a finer uniform mesh, which introduces so-called hanging nodes on edges along the boundary of the fine resolution area. An alternate technique is to tile each face of the cube with quadrilaterals without requiring the quads to be rectangular. These meshes allow for refinement in areas of interest with a conforming mesh, providing a smoother transition between high and low resolution portions of the grid than non-conforming refinement. The conforming meshes are demonstrated in HOMME, NCAR's High Order Method Modeling Environment, where two modifications have been made: the dependence on uniform meshes has been removed, and the ability to read arbitrary quadrilateral meshes from a previously-generated file has been added. Numerical results come from a conservative spectral element method modeling a selection of the standard shallow water test cases.

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Conservative multimoment transport along characteristics for discontinuous Galerkin methods

SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing

Bosler, Peter A.; Bradley, Andrew M.; Taylor, Mark A.

A set of algorithms based on characteristic discontinuous Galerkin methods is presented for tracer transport on the sphere. The algorithms are designed to reduce message passing interface communication volume per unit of simulated time relative to current methods generally, and to the spectral element scheme employed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) specifically. Two methods are developed to enforce discrete mass conservation when the transport schemes are coupled to a separate dynamics solver; constrained transport and Jacobian-combined transport. A communication-efficient method is introduced to enforce tracer consistency between the transport scheme and dynamics solver; this method also provides the transport scheme's shape preservation capability. A subset of the algorithms derived here is implemented in E3SM and shown to improve transport performance by a factor of 2.2 for the model's standard configuration with 40 tracers at the strong scaling limit of one element per core.

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Fourier analyses of high-order continuous and discontinuous Galerkin methods

SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis

Le Roux, Daniel Y.; Eldred, Christopher; Taylor, Mark A.

We present a Fourier analysis of wave propagation problems subject to a class of continuous and discontinuous discretizations using high-degree Lagrange polynomials. This allows us to obtain explicit analytical formulas for the dispersion relation and group velocity and, for the first time to our knowledge, characterize analytically the emergence of gaps in the dispersion relation at specific wavenumbers, when they exist, and compute their specific locations. Wave packets with energy at these wavenumbers will fail to propagate correctly, leading to significant numerical dispersion. We also show that the Fourier analysis generates mathematical artifacts, and we explain how to remove them through a branch selection procedure conducted by analysis of eigenvectors and associated reconstructed solutions. The higher frequency eigenmodes, named erratic in this study, are also investigated analytically and numerically.

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Geometric mapping of tasks to processors on parallel computers with mesh or torus networks

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

Deveci, Mehmet; Devine, Karen D.; Pedretti, Kevin P.; Taylor, Mark A.; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran R.; Çatalyurek, Umit V.

We present a new method for reducing parallel applications’ communication time by mapping their MPI tasks to processors in a way that lowers the distance messages travel and the amount of congestion in the network. Assuming geometric proximity among the tasks is a good approximation of their communication interdependence, we use a geometric partitioning algorithm to order both the tasks and the processors, assigning task parts to the corresponding processor parts. In this way, interdependent tasks are assigned to “nearby” cores in the network. We also present a number of algorithmic optimizations that exploit specific features of the network or application to further improve the quality of the mapping. We specifically address the case of sparse node allocation, where the nodes assigned to a job are not necessarily located in a contiguous block nor within close proximity to each other in the network. However, our methods generalize to contiguous allocations as well, and results are shown for both contiguous and non-contiguous allocations. We show that, for the structured finite difference mini-application MiniGhost, our mapping methods reduced communication time up to 75 percent relative to MiniGhost’s default mapping on 128K cores of a Cray XK7 with sparse allocation. For the atmospheric modeling code E3SM/HOMME, our methods reduced communication time up to 31% on 16K cores of an IBM BlueGene/Q with contiguous allocation.

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HOMMEXX 1.0: A performance-portable atmospheric dynamical core for the Energy Exascale Earth System Model

Geoscientific Model Development

Bertagna, Luca B.; Deakin, Michael; Guba, Oksana G.; Sunderland, Daniel S.; Bradley, Andrew M.; Kalashnikova, Irina; Taylor, Mark A.; Salinger, Andrew G.

We present an architecture-portable and performant implementation of the atmospheric dynamical core (High-Order Methods Modeling Environment, HOMME) of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The original Fortran implementation is highly performant and scalable on conventional architectures using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Open MultiProcessor (OpenMP) programming models. We rewrite the model in C++ and use the Kokkos library to express on-node parallelism in a largely architecture-independent implementation. Kokkos provides an abstraction of a compute node or device, layout-polymorphic multidimensional arrays, and parallel execution constructs. The new implementation achieves the same or better performance on conventional multicore computers and is portable to GPUs. We present performance data for the original and new implementations on multiple platforms, on up to 5400 compute nodes, and study several aspects of the single-and multi-node performance characteristics of the new implementation on conventional CPU (e.g., Intel Xeon), many core CPU (e.g., Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing), and Nvidia V100 GPU.

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Results 1–50 of 87
Results 1–50 of 87