The Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model Running on the Frontier Exascale System

• Published in: SC23: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis pp. 1 - 11
• Main Authors: Taylor, Mark A., Caldwell, Peter M., Bertagna, Luca, Clevenger, Conrad, Donahue, Aaron S., Foucar, James G., Guba, Oksana, Hillman, Benjamin R., Keen, Noel, Krishna, Jayesh, Norman, Matthew R., Sreepathi, Sarat, Terai, Christopher R., White, James B., Wu, Danqing, Salinger, Andrew G., McCoy, Renata B., Leung, L. Ruby, Bader, David C.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: ACM 11.11.2023
• Subjects: Analytical models; Atmospheric modeling; C++ languages; Clouds; Computational modeling; exascale; global cloud resolving; GPU; High performance computing; Libraries
• ISSN: 2167-4337
• DOI: 10.1145/3581784.3627044

We present an efficient and performance portable implementation of the Simple Cloud Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM). SCREAM is a full featured atmospheric global circulation model with a nonhydrostatic dynamical core and state-of-the-art parameterizations for microphysics, moist turbulence and radiation. It has been written from scratch in C++ with the Kokkos library used to abstract the on-node execution model for both CPUs and GPUs. SCREAM is one of only a few global atmosphere models to be ported to GPUs. As far as we know, SCREAM is the first such model to run on both AMD GPUs and NVIDIA GPUs, as well as the first to run on nearly an entire Exascale system (Frontier). On Frontier, we obtained a record setting performance of 1.26 simulated years per day for a realistic cloud resolving simulation.