Public release of Atlas under an open source license, which is accelerator enabled and has improved interoperability features

TL;DR

The paper announces the public release of Atlas, an open-source software library designed for weather prediction and climate modeling, with enhanced interoperability, accelerator support, and user-friendly interfaces.

Contribution

It introduces a new version of Atlas with open-source licensing, improved interoperability features, and support for accelerator hardware, facilitating integration with weather and climate models.

Findings

Atlas is now publicly available with comprehensive documentation.

The library supports both C++ and Fortran interfaces without overhead.

Enhanced interoperability with hardware accelerators is achieved.

Abstract

This document is one of the deliverable reports created for the ESCAPE project. ESCAPE stands for Energy-efficient Scalable Algorithms for Weather Prediction at Exascale. The project develops world-class, extreme-scale computing capabilities for European operational numerical weather prediction and future climate models. This is done by identifying Weather & Climate dwarfs which are key patterns in terms of computation and communication (in the spirit of the Berkeley dwarfs). These dwarfs are then optimised for different hardware architectures (single and multi-node) and alternative algorithms are explored. Performance portability is addressed through the use of domain specific languages. Atlas has been presented in deliverable D1.3. With this deliverable D2.3, a first version of the Atlas software libraries is publicly released with a permissive open-source license. The software is freely available for download, and contains a user guide and installation instructions. The Atlas libraries have been carefully designed with the user's perspective in mind. Even though Atlas is mainly coded in C++, an equivalent Fortran interface is presented without additional runtime overhead. The Fortran interfaces are provided to accommodate existing NWP and climate models that typically consist of Fortran subroutines. The mixed Fortran/C++ design enhances interoperability between NWP and climate models and novel data management techniques. Atlas provides interoperability with accelerator hardware, and can serve as foundation to support higher level abstractions as used in domain specific languages.