TITLE:

Are Many-core Architectures Useful for Weather and Climate Modeling?

DATE:

Friday, March 29th, 2013

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Richard D. Loft.
Director of Technology Development Division.
Computational and Information Systems Laboratory at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

ABSTRACT:

Many-core processor systems such as GPU’s and Intel’s Xeon Phi achieve higher
theoretical performance and improved power efficiency by a trading a decrease
in clock speed for an increase in the number of compute threads. The questions
relevant to this meeting are: 1) Do these architectures offer real benefits in
performance over conventional multiprocessors for climate and weather
applications? 2) If so, is it worth refactoring these large, complex applications to
achieve these benefits? Over the past few years, many weather and a few climate
groups around the world have been trying to answer these questions. This talk will
survey the their progress and experiences, provide some new results and insights
developed at NCAR and at conferences over the past two years.

Specific topics will include: the right and wrong way to measure, report, and think
about many-core performance; assessment of the various programming paradigms
currently available for the processor + many-core accelerator/coprocessor
architecture; experience with different systems, compilers and tools; and the
viability of the code refactoring strategies for many-core processors that have been
tried.

HOST:

Dr. Jose Castillo.

DOWNLOAD:

PPTX File