Performance Optimization of Marine Science and Numerical Modeling on HPC Cluster

PLoS One. 2017 Jan 3;12(1):e0169130. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169130. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Marine science and numerical modeling (MASNUM) is widely used in forecasting ocean wave movement, through simulating the variation tendency of the ocean wave. Although efforts have been devoted to improve the performance of MASNUM from various aspects by existing work, there is still large space unexplored for further performance improvement. In this paper, we aim at improving the performance of propagation solver and data access during the simulation, in addition to the efficiency of output I/O and load balance. Our optimizations include several effective techniques such as the algorithm redesign, load distribution optimization, parallel I/O and data access optimization. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves higher performance compared to the state-of-the-art work, about 3.5x speedup without degrading the prediction accuracy. In addition, the parameter sensitivity analysis shows our optimizations are effective under various topography resolutions and output frequencies.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Communication
  • Computer Simulation*
  • Models, Statistical
  • Oceans and Seas*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Water Movements

Grants and funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61502019) and National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFB1000304).