Improving the scalability of a high-order atmospheric dynamics solver based on the deal.II library

TL;DR

This paper enhances the parallel scalability of a high-order atmospheric dynamics solver using the deal.II library by optimizing numerical methods and leveraging recent library updates.

Contribution

It introduces performance improvements for a matrix-free, implicit-explicit finite element scheme tailored for atmospheric applications, emphasizing parallel efficiency.

Findings

Optimized preconditioning and solving techniques improve performance.

Using the latest deal.II library version boosts parallel scalability.

Profiling guided the focus on performance-critical aspects.

Abstract

We present recent advances on the massively parallel performance of a numerical scheme for atmosphere dynamics applications based on the deal.II library. The implicit-explicit discontinuous finite element scheme is based on a matrix-free approach, meaning that no global sparse matrix is built and only the action of the linear operators on a vector is actually implemented. Following a profiling analysis, we focus on the performance optimization of the numerical method and describe the impact of different preconditioning and solving techniques in this framework. Moreover, we show how the use of the latest version of the deal.II library and of suitable execution flags can improve the parallel performance.