Performance of cmaq on a Mac os X system Thinking different

Performance of CMAQ on a Mac OS X System

Thinking different.

• Motivation

• Methods

• Performance

• Hardware

• Release

• Ongoing Improvements

Motivations.

• Simplified operation

• Easier development

• Easy clustering

• Improved performance

Motivation: Operation.

• Single platform for all research and academic computing

• User-friendly interface

• UNIX OS

• Open source software, hardware support

• Today’s cluster node = tomorrow’s desktop

Motivation: Development.

• Better Developer Tools

• Xcode
• (Interface Builder)
• CHUD performance & debugging suite

• Distribution Tools

• standardized profiles
• PackageMaker
• FAT binaries
• automated installation

Operation & Development.

Motivation: Performance.

• Unique Hardware Advantages

• powerful PPC 970 vector chip
• auto-vectorizing compilers
• 2000 NASA Langley report

• Populist Parallelization

• mix dedicated cluster nodes with free cycles on personal & lab machines
• off-the-shelf solutions
• simple GUI and command-line tools

Methods.

• IBM XL Fortan v8.1 compiler

• auto-vectorization
• equivalent to AIX

• Modifications

• flag conversion
• build settings
• array passing

• > 400 man-hours

Performance.

• 2 Test Machines

• dual 2 GHz G5, 5 GB RAM, 1 GHz bus
• stock dual 1 GHz G4, 1.5 GB RAM, 133 MHz bus
• Mac OS X 10.3.5

• 1 Test Run

• First day of CMAQ 4.3 tutorial
• 1 day, 32 km x 32 km, 38 x 38, 6 layers
• default EBI CB4 chemistry

Benchmarks.

Chemistry.

Good Chemistry.

• Small difference from reference set

• greater than difference among Intel machines and compilers
• Noise, floating point calculations, initialization
• greatest at surface level, early in run
• ambient concentrations only
• random distribution
• no bias
• does not propagate in time or space
• not correlated to high or low concentrations

• Consistent

• G4/G5
• chemistry modules
• compiler flags

Better Chemistry.

Models-3 on Mac, 10/04.

• Core Platform

• MM5 (Fovell)
• MCIP v2.2
• Smoke v2.1
• CMAQ v4.3

Hardware.

Hardware.

• Dedicated Cluster

• XServe G5 Dual 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM
• Xserve RAID 3.5 TB
• 8 Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz, 5 GB RAM

• Distributed Capacity

• student lab eMacs
• personal G4 desktops

Cost Competitive.

• Apple

• Xserve Dual G5 2GHz < $3500
• RAID storage at $3 per GB
• G5 Desktop $2000 - 4000

• Compare to

• Dell PowerVault RAID at $5 per GB
• Dell Precision dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, $1200 - 4200
• Sysadmin costs

Release.

• Following input from the CMAS Center

• alpha code to CMAS by November, 2004
• CMAS testing
• potential support

• Following CMAS Testing, preliminary code, scripts, binaries, instructions

• available for download at www.sage.wisc.edu/cmaq
• Scott Spak will answer questions for early users: [e-mail]

Ongoing improvements.

• Our planned activities

• g95 - GNU compilation
• parallel implementations
• Condor
• Xgrid
• Pooch/Appleseed
• further optimization
• Dual 2.5 GHz benchmarks
• CMAQ MADRID

Acknowledgements.

• Mary Sternitzky, UW

• Seth Price, UW

• Hans Vahlenkamp and NOAA GFDL

• Zac Adelman and the CMAS Help Desk

• Dr. Gail Tonnesen and Glen Kaukola, UCR

• Models-3 Listserv