English

GPU Acceleration of an Established Solar MHD Code using OpenACC

Computational Physics 2019-10-02 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Programming Languages

Abstract

GPU accelerators have had a notable impact on high-performance computing across many disciplines. They provide high performance with low cost/power, and therefore have become a primary compute resource on many of the largest supercomputers. Here, we implement multi-GPU acceleration into our Solar MHD code (MAS) using OpenACC in a fully portable, single-source manner. Our preliminary implementation is focused on MAS running in a reduced physics "zero-beta" mode. While valuable on its own, our main goal is to pave the way for a full physics, thermodynamic MHD implementation. We describe the OpenACC implementation methodology and challenges. "Time-to-solution" performance results of a production-level flux rope eruption simulation on multi-CPU and multi-GPU systems are shown. We find that the GPU-accelerated MAS code has the ability to run "zero-beta" simulations on a single multi-GPU server at speeds previously requiring multiple CPU server-nodes of a supercomputer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.02605,
  title  = {GPU Acceleration of an Established Solar MHD Code using OpenACC},
  author = {R. M. Caplan and J. A. Linker and Z. Mikić and C. Downs and T. Török and V. S. Titov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.02605},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

13 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:06:56.464Z