[MITgcm-support] ifort optimization puzzle

[Ed Hill]

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 08:47 +0100, Martin Losch wrote:
> 
> together with Michael Schodlok I have set up a 1D experiment: 1 column 
> of water (nx=ny=1, overlap=2, nr=30, dz=30*10). We specify zero net 
> surface heat flux (qnet = 0), but -50W/m^2 shortwave heat flux (warming 
> due to the sun), in order to drive kpp. This works all very nicely and 
> we were happy, the mean temperature was constant, as it should (why 
> didn't we stop there?). Then I suggested to move to a faster machine 
> (from a $%^&* SUN to a nice linux-box with ifort). We used the standard 
> ifort build-options file with paths to netcdf appended. But suddenly 
> the system was losing heat at 1200W/m^2. Turning off optimization (-O0) 
> or using g77 gave the old results (with constant mean temperature). We 
> clearly have an optimization problem here. How serious do you think 
> this is (I admit that we are using a somewhat pathological 
> configuration)?

Hi Martin,

Jean-Michel has spent a lot of time recently going through the code and
systematically changing constants such as:

  "2.23" ===> "2.23 _d 0"

and he has found that it really does make different compilers produce
much more similar results.  And apparently the kpp package is just
chock-full of examples like the one above--see for yourself.

So, is there any chance that you're being bitten by type conversions in
kpp -- and that your ifort optimization settings are amplifying the
effect?

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
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