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P29 - ICON-HAM: Modelling Aerosol-Cloud Interactions at High Resolution on GPUs

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CEST
Climate, Weather and Earth Sciences
Chemistry and Materials
Computer Science, Machine Learning, and Applied Mathematics
Applied Social Sciences and Humanities
Engineering
Life Sciences
Physics
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Description

Atmospheric aerosols are a key component to understand the Earth’s climate, as they have a strong influence on clouds, which in turn strongly impact the global radiative budget. The ICON-HAM model couples ICON (Zängl et al., 2015) to the aerosol module HAM (Tegen et al., 2019). The aerosols are represented by seven log-normal distributions, where both their mass mixing ratio and number concentration are prognostically computed (Stier et al., 2005), requiring several tens of transported tracers. The cloud microphysics is implemented in a two-moment cloud scheme (Neubauer et al., 2019), which provides a dynamical link between the aerosols and their effects on clouds and precipitation. To reach cloud-resolving resolutions, the full HAM code was ported to GPUs using OpenACC directives. As expected, the new GPU-enabled ICON-HAM provided promising results in a first test setup, using 40 km horizontal resolution globally and 90 vertical levels over several model-months. However, while a substantial speedup was achieved (more than a factor 2), more complex performance issues likely stemming from the large number of tracers used in ICON-HAM exist, limiting optimal usage of the GPU architecture. To tackle these issues, we envision to extend the OpenACC parallelization to the tracers dimension.

Presenter(s)

Presenter

Mikael
Stellio
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ETH Zurich

I am originally from Ticino, but I studied at ETH Zürich. I have a Bachelor and Master degree in Computational Science and Engineering with a specialization in atmospheric and climate science and fluid dynamics. I think it is fascinating that we are able to (quite accurately) simulate the Earth's atmosphere starting, in principle, from a set of equations. Also, I am passionate about HPC and love solving bugs as a challenge.During my studies I already worked quite a bit with ICON and mostly in the context of GT4Py. Now, I am working with ETHZ and MeteoSwiss on optimizing the HAM aerosol model on GPUs.

Authors