Analysis of MURaM, a Solar Physics Application, for Scalability, Performance and Portability
Eric Wright, Cena Brown, Damien Przybylski, M. Rempel, Supreeth Suresh, Sunita Chandrasekaran · 2023
With the advent of GPUs in parallel computing several languages, tools and compilers are being developed. Many impactful applications can benefit from the performance capabilities these GPUs provide, but moving large, complex code bases to GPU execution often poses many hurdles and growing pains as developers adapt unfamiliar programming models and interface with increasingly complex, but powerful hardwares. One such advanced model is OpenACC, a directive-based parallel programming model designed to target various architectures using a singular source code. In this paper we present our experiences using OpenACC to bring GPU acceleration to MURaM, a state-of-the-art solar physics application jointly developed and used by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Max Planck Institute of Solar System Research (MPS).