Abstract
A WRF weather model configuration with high I/O frequency was tested on three IBM supercomputers for up to 6144 cores. Scalability, overall performance, and I/O throughput was examined for a 12-h forecast with hourly I/O intervals. The three parallel systems tested were the (a) POWER 775 cluster (p7-IH, IBM POWER7, HFI interconnect), (b) the POWER 460 cluster (Pureflex IBM POWER7, Dual QDR Infiniband interconnect) and (c) the iDataPlex cluster (dx360M4 Intel Sandybridge, FDR14 interconnect). MPI traces were obtained on all systems for runs with 128, 256, 512, 1024, 1536, 2048, 3072, 4096 and 6144 cores. I/O quilting was employed, and the number of MPI tasks (including task grids), OpenMP threads and I/O quilting tasks was kept Identical across all three systems. The effects of computation, communication, I/O throughput, load imbalance and simultaneous multithreading (SMT), was examined across all three systems and for all core counts. It was found that all systems performed similarly, despite significant differences in interconnect, processor, I/O subsystems and software/compiler technologies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. http://www.wrf-model.org
Skamarock, W.C., Klemp, J.B., Dudhia, J., Gill, D.O., Barker, D.M., Duda, M., Huang, X.-Y., Wang, W., Powers, J.G.: A Description of the Advanced Research WRFVersion 3, NCAR Technical Note (2008)
WRF V3 Parallel Benchmark Page. http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/WG2/benchv3/
Michalakes, J., Hacker, J., Loft, R., McCracken, M.O., Snavely, A., Wright, N.J., Spelce, T., Gorda, B., Walkup, R.: WRF nature run. J. Physics: Conf. Series 125(1), 012022 (2008). SciDAC 2008, 13–17 July 2008, Washington, USA, 2008
The IBM p775 System. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248003.pdf
The IBM p460 System. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247989.pdf
The IBM dx360M4 iDataPlex. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247629.pdf
The IBM GPFS. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247844.pdf
Langkamp, T., Bohner, J.: Influence of the compiler on multi-CPU performance of WRFv3. Geosci. Model Dev. 4, 611–623 (2011)
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=2021&uid=swg27005374
Jianwei L., Liao, W.-K., Choudhary, A., Ross, R., Thakur, R., Gropp, W., Latham, R., Siegel, A., Gallagher, B., Zingale, M.: Parallel netCDF: a scientific high-performance I/O interface. In: Proceedings of the 15th Supercomputing Conference, Phoenix, AZ, November 2003
https://www.power.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/POWER7_PMU_Detailed_Event_Description.pdf
Hoisie, A., Johnson, G., Kerbyson, D.J., Lang, M., Pakin, S.: A performance comparison through benchmarking and modeling of three leading supercomputers: blue Gene/L, red storm, and purple. In: Proceedings of IEEE/ACM Supercomputing (SC 2006), Tampa, FL (2006)
Arnold, D., Morton, D., Schicker, I., Jorba, O., Harrison, K., Zabloudil, J., Newby, G., Seibert, P.: WRF benchmark for regional applications. In: WRF User’s Workshop (2011)
Morton, D., Nudson, O., Stephenson, C.: Benchmarking and evaluation of the weather research and forecasting (WRF) model on the Cray XT5. In: Proceedings of CUG (2009)
Kerbyson, D.J., Barker, K.J., Davis, K.: Analysis of the weather research and forecasting (WRF) model on large-scale systems. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Parallel Computing. Advances in Parallel Computing, vol. 15. IOS Press (2008). ISSN 0927-5452, ISBN 978-1-58603-796-3
Porter, A.R., Ashworth, M.: Configuring and optimizing the weather research and forecast model on the CRAY XT. In: 2010 Cray User Group Proceedings
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge the China Meteorological Administration and Ms. Wei Min, for configuring WRF and preparing the Initial and boundary conditions for the runs. Acknowledgement is extended to Mr. James Abeles of IBM for performing the WRF scaling runs on the iDataPlex dx360M4 system.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Christidis, Z. (2015). Performance and Scaling of WRF on Three Different Parallel Supercomputers. In: Kunkel, J., Ludwig, T. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9137. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20119-1_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20119-1_37
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20118-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-20119-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)