The investigated ocean modeling code bases on a five layer model using higher order spectral elements for discretization and a special filtering technique for the vortex and divergence field. These filterings contain the solving of the Laplace equation for the velocity components in x- and y-direction cause on each layer most of the arithmetic work per time step. The system matrix is never accumulated and so all matrix operations are performed on an element level with the small dense element matrices. We have the special situation that the system matrix and the filtering matrix are the same for both directions and for all layers. This gave us the chance to redesigning the code such that all layers and directions can be handled simultaneously. The general reduction of memory accesses together with cache aware data structures improve the run time significantly. These techniques can be also used very successfully when the pcg solver uses multigrid as preconditioner.

Ocean Modeling Session