26 PFLOPS Stencil Computations for Atmospheric Modeling on Sunway TaihuLight

Stencil computation arises from a broad set of scientific and engineering applications and often plays a critical role in the performance of extreme-scale simulations. Due to the memory bound nature, it is a challenging task to opti- mize stencil computation kernels on modern supercomputers with relatively high computing throughput whilst relatively low data-moving capability. This work serves as a demon- stration on the details of the algorithms, implementations and optimizations of a real-world stencil computation in 3D nonhydrostatic atmospheric modeling on the newly announced Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. At the algorithm level, we present a computation-communication overlapping technique to reduce the inter-process communication overhead, a locality- aware blocking method to fully exploit on-chip parallelism with enhanced data locality, and a collaborative data accessing scheme for sharing data among different threads. In addition, a variety of effective hardware specific implementation and optimization strategies on both the process- and thread-level, from the fine-grained data management to the data layout transformation, are developed to further improve the per- formance. Our experiments demonstrate that a single-process many-core speedup of as high as 170x can be achieved by using the proposed algorithm and optimization strategies. The code scales well to millions of cores in terms of strong scalability. And for the weak-scaling tests, the code can scale in a nearly ideal way to the full system scale of more than 10 million cores, sustaining 25.96 PFLOPS in double precision, which is 20% of the peak performance.