10M-Core Scalable Fully-Implicit Solver for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamics

An ultra-scalable fully-implicit solver is developed for stiff time-dependent problems arising from the hyperbolic conservation laws in nonhydrostatic atmospheric dynamics. In the solver, we propose a highly efficient hybrid domain-decomposed multigrid preconditioner that can greatly accelerate the convergence rate at the extreme scale. For solving the overlapped subdomain problems, a geometry-based pipelined incomplete LU factorization method is designed to further exploit the on-chip fine-grained concurrency. We perform systematic optimizations on different hardware levels to achieve best utilization of the heterogeneous computing units and substantial reduction of data movement cost. The fully-implicit solver successfully scales to the entire system of the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer with over 10.5M heterogeneous cores, sustaining an aggregate performance of 7.95 PFLOPS in double-precision, and enables fast and accurate atmospheric simulations at the 488-m horizontal resolution (over 770 billion unknowns) with 0.07 simulated-years-per-day. This is, to our knowledge, the largest fully-implicit simulation to date.