Title
STELLA: a domain-specific tool for structured grid methods in weather and climate models
Abstract
Many high-performance computing applications solving partial differential equations (PDEs) can be attributed to the class of kernels using stencils on structured grids. Due to the disparity between floating point operation throughput and main memory bandwidth these codes typically achieve only a low fraction of peak performance. Unfortunately, stencil computation optimization techniques are often hardware dependent and lead to a significant increase in code complexity. We present a domain-specific tool, STELLA, which eases the burden of the application developer by separating the architecture dependent implementation strategy from the user-code and is targeted at multi- and manycore processors. On the example of a numerical weather prediction and regional climate model (COSMO) we demonstrate the usefulness of STELLA for a real-world production code. The dynamical core based on STELLA achieves a speedup factor of 1.8x (CPU) and 5.8x (GPU) with respect to the legacy code while reducing the complexity of the user code.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2807591.2807627
International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Keywords
Field
DocType
Atmospheric model, domain-specific language, heterogeneous system, stencil
Memory bandwidth,Computer science,Floating point,Stencil,Parallel computing,Cyclomatic complexity,Stencil code,Legacy code,Grid,Speedup,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5090-0273-3
19
0.73
References 
Authors
14
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tobias Gysi1241.57
Carlos Osuna2190.73
Oliver Fuhrer3464.72
Mauro Bianco4221.46
Thomas C. Schulthess510615.16