27.06.2024
On 24-26 June 2024, Amsterdam (Netherlands) held the 2nd ESiWACE3 Hackathon. Entitled “Optimisation and Tuning of Earth-System Models”, the event targeted weather and climate modellers at all career stages, aiming to assist climate scientists with optimising earth-system models (ESMs). It was an on-site event at the Netherlands eScience Center (in Amsterdam), with no possibility of remote participation.
The hackathon was designed so that participants could bring their codes and work in teams, together with HPC experts, to improve their code performance. In the context of the optimisation and tuning of ESMs, the focus of this hackathon was on (but not limited to) porting of code to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), performance portability on different architectures, use of auto-tuning for performance optimisation or energy-efficiency, and application of mixed-precision programming techniques.
In the end, only one team participated in the hackathon. It came from Delft University of Technology, and the team worked on the OpenACC port of DALES, the Dutch Atmospheric Large Eddy Simulation, in collaboration with ESiWACE3 experts. After profiling DALES on the GPU, the team used Kernel Tuner to improve the performance of the most compute-intensive sections of the model.
