[MITgcm-support] Wrapper bindings to OpenCL C library - The possibilities of GPGPU?

[Robin Despouys]

Hello Dear Community,

I would like to know if there is any current work on trying to use Graphics
Processing Units in order to accelerate the simulations on
personal desktop.

I just discovered this incredible work, MITgcm, thanks to a friend who is
doing simulations for his PhD. We managed to run his simulations on my
Computer but due to the limitations of my CPU 4 cores, 4 Ghz I
theoretically have 64 GFLOPS on best case scenario, and according to the
specs of my GPU I could theoretically have 7 TFLOPS (again best case
scenario).

So today we started a simulation using MPI and 4 cores, my friend says it
will take roughly 4 days.  So with my simple supposition and ignoring all
the drawbacks and limitations due to the synchronisation of highly
multithreaded computation we could run this simulation 100 times faster
which would reduce the computation time to ~ 1 hour.

I know that we could simply use MPI with a cluster of machines or with a
super-calculator.
I can't help but think : that there might be a way to harness the power of
GPUs by using an implementation of the OpenCL standard in C and make it
"callable" through the wrapper without having to change the numerical
input models.

I am very new to FORTRAN and I have a reasonable understanding of C but at
the moment I have a very approximate knowledge of the Software Architecture
of MITGcm. Then... maybe what I am asking for is impossible.

But if it is possible! Perhaps some of you could point me at the parts I
should focus on what/where should I update/add some code. (Yup it is a very
broad question^_^).

Best regards,

Robin
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