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Online Mesh Refinement for Parallel Atmospheric Models

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Abstract

Forecast precisions of climatological models are limited by computing power and time available for the executions. As more and faster processors are used in the computation, the resolution of the mesh adopted to represent the Earth’s atmosphere can be increased, and consequently the numerical forecast is more accurate. However, a finer mesh resolution, able to include local phenomena in a global atmosphere integration, is still not possible due to the large number of data elements to compute in this case. To overcome this situation, different mesh refinement levels can be used at the same time for different areas of the domain. Thus, our paper evaluates how mesh refinement at run time (online) can improve performance for climatological models.The online mesh refinement (OMR) increases dynamically mesh resolution in parts of a domain,when special atmosphere conditions are registered during the execution. Experimental results show that the execution of a model improved by OMR provides better resolution for the meshes, without any significant increase of execution time. The parallel performance of the simulations is also increased through the creation of threads in order to explore different levels of parallelism.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Brazilian research foundation Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)—“National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Computação (PPGC), Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Caixa Postal 15.064, 91.501-970 , Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

    Claudio Schepke & Nicolas Maillard

  2. Fachgebiet Kommunikations- und Betriebssysteme (KBS), Institut für Telekommunikationssysteme, Technische Universität Berlin (TU-Berlin), Einsteinufer 17, 10587 , Berlin, Germany

    Joerg Schneider & Hans-Ulrich Heiss

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  1. Claudio Schepke
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  2. Nicolas Maillard
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  3. Joerg Schneider
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  4. Hans-Ulrich Heiss
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Correspondence to Claudio Schepke.

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Schepke, C., Maillard, N., Schneider, J. et al. Online Mesh Refinement for Parallel Atmospheric Models. Int J Parallel Prog 41, 552–569 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-012-0235-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-012-0235-4

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