tehrengruber/gridtools

Libraries and utilities to develop performance portable applications for weather and climate.

The GridTools framework is a set of libraries and utilities to develop performance portable applications in the area of weather and climate. To achieve the goal of performance portability, the user-code is written in a generic form which is then optimized for a given architecture at compile-time. The core of GridTools is the stencil composition module which implements a DSL embedded in C++ for stencils and stencil-like patterns. Further, GridTools provides modules for halo exchanges, boundary conditions, data management and bindings to C and Fortran.

GridTools is successfully used to accelerate the dynamical core of the COSMO model with improved performance on CUDA-GPUs compared to the current official version, demonstrating production quality and feature-completeness of the library for models on lat-lon grids.

Although GridTools was developed for weather and climate applications it might be applicable for other domains with a focus on stencil-like computations.

A detailed introduction can be found in the documentation.

Installation instructions

git clone https://github.com/GridTools/gridtools.git
cd gridtools
mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j8
make test

For choosing the compiler, use the standard CMake techniques, e.g. setting the environment variables

CXX=`which g++` # full path to the C++ compiler
CC=`which gcc` # full path to theC compiler
FC=`which gfortran` # full path to theFortran compiler
CUDACXX=`which nvcc` # full path to NVCC
CUDAHOSTCXX=`which g++` # full path to the C++ compiler to be used as CUDA host compiler

Requirements

• Boost (1.65.1 or later)
• CMake (3.14.5 or later)
• CUDA Toolkit (9.0 or later, optional)
• MPI (optional, CUDA-aware MPI for the GPU communication module gcl_gpu)

Supported compilers

The GridTools libraries are currently nightly tested with the following compilers on CSCS supercomputers.

Compiler	Backend	Tested on	Comments
Cray clang version 9.0.2	all backends	Piz Daint	with flags -fno-cray-gpu -fno-cray, P100 GPU
GNU 7.3.0 + NVCC 10.1	all backends	Piz Daint	P100 GPU
Clang 7.0.1 + NVCC 10.1	all backends	Piz Daint	GPU compilation in NVCC-CUDA mode, P100 GPU
GNU 8.3.0 + NVCC 10.1	all backends	Tsa	V100 GPU
HIP-Clang pre-release, based on Clang 10.0.0	all backends	Ault	Mi50 GPU

Officially not supported (no workarounds implemented and planned)

Compiler	Backend	Date	Comments
Cray without Clang frontend	cpu_kfirst		no effort to fix compilation
NVCC <= 9.1 with GNU 6.x	gpu	2018-10-16	similar to this tuple bug
PGI 18.5	cpu_kfirst	2018-12-06	no effort to fix compilation
Intel 19.0.1.144	all backends	2020-05-11	Intel workarounds removed in GridTools 2.0 (goal would be to support Intel with -qnextgen)
Intel 19.1.0.166	all backends	2020-05-11	even with -qnextgen, no effort to fix compilation

Contributing

Contributions to the GridTools framework are welcome. Please open an issue for any bugs that you encounter or provide a fix or enhancement as a PR. External contributions to GridTools require us a signed copy of a copyright release form to ETH Zurich. We will contact you on the PR.