Coastal Ocean Modeling of the U.S. West Coast with Multiblock Grid and Dual-Level Parallelism

Abstract

In coastal ocean modeling, a one-block rectangular grid for a large domain has large memory requirements and long processing times. With complicated coastlines, the number of grid points used in the calculation is often the same or smaller than the number of unused grid points. These problems have been a major concern for researchers in this field. Multiblock grid generation and dual-level parallel techniques are solutions that can overcome these problems. The Multiblock Grid Princeton Ocean Model (MGPOM) uses Message Passing Interface (MPI) to parallelize computations by assigning each grid block to a unique processor. Since not all grid blocks are of the same size, the workload between MPI processes varies. Pthreads is used to improve load balance. Performance results from the MGPOM model on a one-block grid and a 29-block grid simulation for the U.S. west coast demonstrate the efficacy of both the MPI-Only and MPI-Pthreads code versions.