Publication Date
5-2020
Date of Final Oral Examination (Defense)
3-11-2020
Type of Culminating Activity
Thesis
Degree Title
Master of Science in Computer Science
Department
Computer Science
Supervisory Committee Chair
Catherine Olschanowsky, Ph.D.
Supervisory Committee Member
Michael Ekstrand, Ph.D.
Supervisory Committee Member
Alejandro Flores, Ph.D.
Abstract
Legacy scientific applications represent significant investments by universities, engineers, and researchers and contain valuable implementations of key scientific computations. Over time hardware architectures have changed. Adapting existing code to new architectures is time consuming, expensive, and increases code complexity. The increase in complexity negatively affects the scientific impact of the applications. There is an immediate need to reduce complexity. We propose using abstractions to manage and reduce code complexity, improving scientific impact of applications.
This thesis presents a set of abstractions targeting boundary conditions in iterative solvers. Many scientific applications represent physical phenomena as a set of partial differential equations (PDEs). PDEs are structured around steady state and boundary condition equations, starting from initial conditions.
The proposed abstractions separate architecture specific implementation details from the primary computation. We use ParFlow to demonstrate the effectiveness of the abstractions. ParFlow is a hydrologic and geoscience application that simulates surface and subsurface water flow. The abstractions have enabled ParFlow developers to successfully add new boundary conditions for the first time in 15 years, and have enabled an experimental OpenMP version of ParFlow that is transparent to computational scientists. This is achieved without requiring expensive rewrites of key computations or major codebase changes; improving developer productivity, enabling hardware portability, and allowing transparent performance optimizations.
DOI
10.18122/td/1681/boisestate
Recommended Citation
Burke, Michael, "Improving Scientist Productivity, Architecture Portability, and Performance in ParFlow" (2020). Boise State University Theses and Dissertations. 1681.
10.18122/td/1681/boisestate