UKCA GPU port

Whilst a Scientific Software Engineer (SSE) at the Met Office, I was deployed on the GPU port for UKCA. UKCA is known to be a particularly computationally costly part of the Met Office’s model, making it a key candidate for acceleration via GPU offloading.

Early in the project, I worked with collaborators to first manually insert OpenACC pragmas for offloading on Nvidia GPUs. Facilitating this also involved major code changes and refactoring.

Later in the project, I led the effort to replicate the manual insertion of OpenACC pragmas using PSyclone, to improve portability of the GPU porting approach. To achieve this, I developed an internal tool for streamlining OpenACC GPU porting with PSyclone, which I have since upstreamed into PSyclone itself.

Upon joining the University of Cambridge as an RSE, I was deployed part-time onto the follow-up project, NG-ARCH, which was outsourced to several UK universities by the Met Office. The focus of this work is to build upon the ExCALIBUR effort and work to get the approach merged into the main codebase.

I continue to make regular contributions to both UKCA and PSyclone.

Funding information

My work as an SSE at the Met Office received funding from the UK’s ExCALIBUR exascale computing grant. The NG-ARCH project is part of the Met Office’s Next-Generation Modelling Systems (NGMS) programme.