Enhancing regional ocean modeling simulation performance with the Xeon Phi architecture

Ocean studies are crucial to many scientific disciplines. Due to the difficulty in probing the deep layers of the ocean and the scarcity of data in some of the oceans, the scientific community relies heavily on ocean simulation models. Ocean modeling is complex and computationally intensive, and improving the performance of these models will greatly advance and improve the work of ocean scientists. This paper presents a detailed exploration of the acceleration of the Regional Ocean Model System (ROMS) software with the latest Intel Xeon Phi x200 architectures. Both shared-memory and distributed-memory parallel computing models are evaluated. Results show run time improvements of nearly a factor of 16 compared to a serial implementation. Further experiments and optimizations, including the use of a GPU acceleration model, are discussed and results are presented.