Trials and Triumphs with Next Generation Compute Nodes

Dave Norton

The Portland Group

Lake Tahoe, California

Abstract

Computers continue to get bigger and node parallelism continues to increase.  These are not new observations, but rather continuing trends.  The node parallelism is becoming increasing reliant on accelerators from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.  Programming accelerators in a manner that is incremental to the existing code base, portable across hardware platforms, and independent of software vendors has been the motivation behind OpenACC.

 This talk will explore some of the challenges and positive outcomes of using OpenACC as a method for expressing parallelism in weather codes.