TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hokkanen, Jaro
AU  - Kollet, Stefan
AU  - Kraus, Jiri
AU  - Herten, Andreas
AU  - Hrywniak, Markus
AU  - Pleiter, Dirk
TI  - Leveraging HPC accelerator architectures with modern techniques — hydrologic modeling on GPUs with ParFlow
JO  - Computational geosciences
VL  - 25
IS  - 5
SN  - 1420-0597
CY  - Bussum
PB  - Baltzer Science Publ.
M1  - FZJ-2021-04767
SP  - 1579 - 1590
PY  - 2021
AB  - 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.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000645878000001
DO  - DOI:10.1007/s10596-021-10051-4
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/903038
ER  -