AGCM-3DLF: Accelerating Atmospheric General Circulation Model via 3-D Parallelization and Leap-Format

The atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM) has been an important research tool in the study of climate change for decades. As the demand for high-resolution simulation is becoming urgent, the scalability and simulation efficiency is faced with great challenges, especially for the latitude-longitude mesh-based models. In this paper, we propose a highly scalable 3-D atmospheric general circulation model based on leap-format, namely AGCM-3DLF. First, it utilizes a 3-D decomposition method allowing for parallelism release in all three physical dimensions. Then the leap-format difference computation scheme is adopted to maintain computational stability in grid updating and avoid additional filtering at the high latitudes. A novel shifting window communication algorithm is designed for parallelization of the unified model. Furthermore, a series of optimizations are conducted to improve the effectiveness of large-scale simulations. Experiment results in different platforms demonstrate good efficiency and scalability of the model. AGCM-3DLF scales up to the entire CAS-Xiandao1 supercomputer (196,608 CPU cores), attaining the speed of 11.1 simulation-year-per-day (SYPD) at a high resolution of 25KM. In addition, simulations conducted on the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer exhibit a 1.06 million cores scalability with 36.1% parallel efficiency.