Improving the scalability of a high-order atmospheric dynamics solver based on the deal.II library

Abstract

We present recent advances on the massively parallel performance of a numerical scheme for atmosphere dynamics applications based on the deal.II library. The implicit-explicit discontinuous finite element scheme is based on a matrix-free approach, meaning that no global sparse matrix is built and only the action of the linear operators on a vector is actually implemented. Following a profiling analysis, we focus on the performance optimization of the numerical method and describe the impact of different preconditioning and solving techniques in this framework. Moreover, we show how the use of the latest version of the deal.II library and of suitable execution flags can improve the parallel performance.