NEPTUNE Development for Next Generation HPC

NRL’s Marine Meteorology Division is developing NEPTUNE, a new global weather model to go into U.S. Navy operational forecasting early next decade. NEPTUNE is based on the Naval Post Graduate School NUMA spectral element dynamical core (Giraldo, et al.) and designed to be memory local, computationally dense and scalable to higher numerical order and larger problem sizes. Performance characterization and optimization and evaluation of programming models for performance portability are key to positioning NEPTUNE to take advantage of HPC architectures through at least the next decade. This talk will provide an introduction to goals and status of the NEPTUNE project emphasizing challenges for computational readiness with results of testing on different processors, including ARM, and early experiences with programming models for performance portability, including early testing of NEPTUNE kernels using the DOE’s Kokkos library.