GPU-RRTMG_SW: Accelerating a Shortwave Radiative Transfer Scheme on GPU

Abstract

As high performance computing technology continues to develop rapidly, graphics processing units (GPUs) are more widely used for daily computing tasks. However, some applications, such as weather forecasting, require large-scale computation. Thus, due to the computationally intensive characteristics of the rapid radiative transfer model for general circulation models (RRTMG) in the Earth system model, this study uses GPU-related technology to accelerate computation of the model. First, two kinds of algorithms using GPU technology to accelerate the RRTMG shortwave radiation scheme (RRTMG_SW) are proposed. Then, an optimization method for data transmission between host and device is proposed. Finally, after using CUDA Fortran and CUDA C to implement these algorithms, two GPU versions of RRTMG_SW, namely CF-RRTMG_SW (CUDA Fortran version) and CC-RRTMG_SW (CUDA C version), were developed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed acceleration algorithms are effective. Without I/O transfer, running CC-RRTMG_SW on a NVIDIA GeForce Titan V GPU achieved a 38.88× speedup when compared to a single Intel Xeon E5-2680 CPU core.