Load Balance Plots
In contrast to the co-located version mentioned above, its possible for
the two basic components of FOAM (the ocean and atmosphere models) to each
run on different subsets of the total processor space. The atmosphere model
requires much more real time than the ocean model to simulate a given length
of time. This difference can be attributed to the atmosphere model's more
complex code (with radiation and convection parameterizations) and shorter
time step (half hour for the atmosphere vs. six hours for the ocean.)
This difference in complexity is reflected in how the processors are
divided among the two models in this mode. One common arrangement uses
16 processors for the atmosphere model and only one for the ocean. Even
though the atmosphere has most of the nodes, the ocean model still spends
time waiting for the atmosphere to catch up.
The plots below give an idea of the relative workload on the processors.
The different colors represent different tasks:
Each row represents a different processor (only a few of the atmosphere
processors are shown, but all of the ocean processors are shown). The numbers
on the y-axis represent the rank in MPI_COMM_WORLD.
This shows how the tasks are decomposed onto separate processors, and
also how the ocean has to wait after its steps (the violet area after each
blue bar) for the atmosphere to send some more information. Notice that
every other atmosphere segment (in green) is longer. This is because the
radiation calculations are done every other step. The longer coupler segment
(in red) is a result of the added time needed to perform the communication
with the ocean model.
For 17 Processors: (Each tick along the bottom represents 2.5 seconds)
For 34 Processors (32 atmosphere and 2 ocean): (Each tick along the
bottom represents 1 second)
These plots were created using UPSHOT.
|