ESiWACE2 Service 1 call for projects for 2021 is now open!
1 Oct 2020 - 3 min
After a year of successful collaborations in accelerating atmospheric and sea ice-ocean modeling, we look forward to another year of working together with weather and climate modeling scientists in Europe.
Achievements
In 2020, the Research Software Engineers (RSEs) from the Netherlands eScience Center and ATOS Bull have been working together with the model developers of FESOM2, DALES, EMAC, and OBLIMAP.
We have performed extensive performance and code analyses and are currently exploring the benefits of porting FESOM2 to GPUs. We are experimenting with two approaches, porting the tracer advection routines to tuneable CUDA-C kernels, and by inserting OpenACC directives in the original Fortran code.
In DALES, we have worked on the pressure equation solver and MPI optimizations, and are currently investigating the performance and accuracy impacts of using single-precision floating-point operations in parts of the code.
OBLIMAP2 has been ported to the Atos Bull Sequana XH2000 supercomputer and performance profiling is currently ongoing.
In EMAC, we have significantly reduced the GPU memory consumption by reducing stack allocations and other memory optimizations, and in turn drastically improved the GPU utilization and performance. We are currently investigating the use of CUDA streams to overlap data transfers between host and device memories with GPU computations.
Will you join the exascale revolution?
In 2021, we will continue our efforts to prepare the weather and climate modeling communities in Europe for the upcoming exascale revolution. The ESiWACE2 Services create short collaborative projects that offer guidance, engineering, and advice by the ESiWACE2 consortium partners to support exascale preparations for weather and climate models in Europe. All groups developing weather and climate codes – not only the ESiWACE2 partners – can apply to these services. Service 1 targets model developing groups and assists with porting the codes to new hardware platforms, such as GPUs.
Funding
Up to four proposals will be granted as part of the call. Each grant will consist of in-kind support in the form of highly-skilled Research Software Engineers (RSEs) employed by the Netherlands eScience Center and/or Atos-Bull. The RSEs will work remotely on the project for 6 person months (PMs) during 2021. The hours will be planned flexibly and in mutual agreement with the applicant.
Procedure and deadline
Following submission, a technical review will be carried out on the technical feasibility and state-of-the art technology. The proposals that pass the review will be sent to an external scientific review committee for a final selection based on scientific merit and impact. The accepted proposals will be announced in December 2020.
The submission deadline is 14:00 CET on 1 November, 2020.
See the ESiWACE 2 call page and ESiWACE website for more information on the call, requirements, application process.
Read more about the ESiWACE2 project
ESiWACE2 has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 823988.