Parallel Construction of the WRF Pleim-Xiu Land Surface Scheme With Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture

Abstract

The weather research and forecast model (WRF), a simulation model, is built for the needs of both research and operational weather forecast and research in atmospheric science. The land-surface model (LSM), which describes one physical process in atmosphere, supplies the heat and moisture fluxes over land points and sea-ice points. Among several schemes of LSM that have been developed and incorporated into WRF, Pleim-Xiu (PX) scheme is one popular scheme in LSM. Processing the WRF simulation codes for weather prediction has acquired the benefits of dramatically increasing computing power with the advent of large-scale parallelism. Several merits such as vectorization essence, efficient parallelization, and multiprocessor computer structure of Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture allow us to accelerate the computation performance of the modeling code of the PX scheme. This paper demonstrates that our results of the optimized MIC-based PX scheme executing on Xeon Phi coprocessor 7120P enhances the computing performance by 2.3× and 11.7×, respectively, in comparison to the initial CPU-based code running on one CPU socket (eight cores) and on one single CPU core with Intel Xeon E5-2670.