Speeding Up the Computation of WRF Double-Moment 6-Class Microphysics Scheme with GPU

Abstract

he Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) double-moment 6-class microphysics scheme (WDM6) implements a double-moment bulk microphysical parameterization of clouds and precipitation and is applicable in mesoscale and general circulation models. WDM6 extends the WRF single-moment 6-class microphysics scheme (WSM6) by incorporating the number concentrations for cloud and rainwater along with a prognostic variable of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) number concentration. Moreover, it predicts the mixing ratios of six water species (water vapor, cloud droplets, cloud ice, snow, rain, and graupel), similar to WSM6. This paper describes improving the computational performance of WDM6 by exploiting its inherent fine-grained parallelism using the NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU). Compared to the single-threaded CPU, a single GPU implementation of WDM6 obtains a speedup of 150? with the input/output (I/O) transfer and 206? without the I/O transfer. Using four GPUs, the speedup reaches 347? and 715?, respectively.