%0 Journal Article
%A Hokkanen, Jaro
%A Kollet, Stefan
%A Kraus, Jiri
%A Herten, Andreas
%A Hrywniak, Markus
%A Pleiter, Dirk
%T Leveraging HPC accelerator architectures with modern techniques — hydrologic modeling on GPUs with ParFlow
%J Computational geosciences
%V 25
%N 5
%@ 1420-0597
%C Bussum
%I Baltzer Science Publ.
%M FZJ-2021-04767
%P 1579 - 1590
%D 2021
%X Rapidly changing heterogeneous supercomputer architectures pose a great challenge to many scientific communities trying to leverage the latest technology in high-performance computing. Many existing projects with a long development history have resulted in a large amount of code that is not directly compatible with the latest accelerator architectures. Furthermore, due to limited resources of scientific institutions, developing and maintaining architecture-specific ports is generally unsustainable. In order to adapt to modern accelerator architectures, many projects rely on directive-based programming models or build the codebase tightly around a third-party domain-specific language or library. This introduces external dependencies out of control of the project. The presented paper tackles the issue by proposing a lightweight application-side adaptor layer for compute kernels and memory management resulting in a versatile and inexpensive adaptation of new accelerator architectures with little draw backs. A widely used hydrologic model demonstrates that such an approach pursued more than 20 years ago is still paying off with modern accelerator architectures as demonstrated by a very significant performance gain from NVIDIA A100 GPUs, high developer productivity, and minimally invasive implementation; all while the codebase is kept well maintainable in the long-term.
%F PUB:(DE-HGF)16
%9 Journal Article
%U <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000645878000001
%R 10.1007/s10596-021-10051-4
%U https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/903038