2011 Symposium on Application Accelerators in High-Performance Computing (SAAHPC'11)

Accelerating a climate physics model with OpenCL

Fahad Zafar, Dibyajyoti Ghosh, Lawrence Sebald, and Shujia Zhou

July 19, 2011

Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is fast becoming the standard for heterogeneous parallel com- puting. It is designed to run on CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerator architectures. By implementing a real- world application, a solar radiation model component widely used in climate and weather models, we show that OpenCL multi-threaded programming and execution model can dramatically increase performance even on CPU architectures. Our preliminary investigation indicates that low-level vector instructions and code representations in OpenCL contribute to dramatic performance improvement over the serial version when compared with the execution of the serial code compiled across various compilers on multiple platforms with auto vectorization flags. However, the portability of OpenCL implementations needs to improve, even for CPU architectures.

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Tags: climate model, compilers, gcc, heterogeneous architectures, ibm cell b.e., ibm xlc, icc, multi-threaded programming, opencl, parallel computing, vectorization

Type: InProceedings

Publisher: IEEE Computer Society

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