Accelerating the Dutch Atmospheric Large-Eddy Simulation (DALES) Model with OpenACC

This paper presents the GPU porting through OpenACC directives of the Dutch Atmospheric Large-Eddy Simulation (DALES) application, a high-resolution atmospheric model. The code is written in Fortran 90 and features parallel (distributed) execution through spatial domain decomposition. We assess the performance of the GPU offloading, comparing the time-to-solution on regular and accelerated HPC nodes. A weak scaling analysis is conducted and portability across NVIDIA A100 and H100 hardware is discussed. Finally, we show how targeted kernels can benefit from further optimization with Kernel Tuner, a GPU kernels auto-tuning package.