Parallel-in-time integration of the shallow water equations on the rotating sphere using Parareal and MGRIT

Despite the growing interest in parallel-in-time methods as an approach to accelerate numerical simulations in atmospheric modelling, improving their stability and convergence remains a substantial challenge for their application to operational models. In this work, we study the temporal parallelization of the shallow water equations on the rotating sphere combined with time-stepping schemes commonly used in atmospheric modelling due to their stability properties, namely an Eulerian implicit-explicit (IMEX) method and a semi-Lagrangian semi-implicit method (SL-SI-SETTLS). The main goal is to investigate the performance of parallel-in-time methods, namely Parareal and Multigrid Reduction in Time (MGRIT), when these well-established schemes are used on the coarse discretization levels and provide insights on how they can be improved for better performance. We begin by performing an analytical stability study of Parareal and MGRIT applied to a linearized ordinary differential equation depending on the choice of a coarse scheme. Next, we perform numerical simulations of two standard tests to evaluate the stability, convergence and speedup provided by the parallel-in-time methods compared to a fine reference solution computed serially. We also conduct a detailed investigation on the influence of artificial viscosity and hyperviscosity approaches, applied on the coarse discretization levels, on the performance of the temporal parallelization. Both the analytical stability study and the numerical simulations indicate a poorer stability behaviour when SL-SI-SETTLS is used on the coarse levels, compared to the IMEX scheme. With the IMEX scheme, a better trade-off between convergence, stability and speedup compared to serial simulations can be obtained under proper parameters and artificial viscosity choices, opening the perspective of the potential competitiveness for realistic models.Comment: 35 pages, 23 figure

Multilayer shallow water models with locally variable number of layers and semi-implicit time discretization

We propose an extension of the discretization approaches for multilayer shallow water models, aimed at making them more flexible and efficient for realistic applications to coastal flows. A novel discretization approach is proposed, in which the number of vertical layers and their distribution are allowed to change in different regions of the computational domain. Furthermore, semi-implicit schemes are employed for the time discretization, leading to a significant efficiency improvement for subcritical regimes. We show that, in the typical regimes in which the application of multilayer shallow water models is justified, the resulting discretization does not introduce any major spurious feature and allows again to reduce substantially the computational cost in areas with complex bathymetry. As an example of the potential of the proposed technique, an application to a sediment transport problem is presented, showing a remarkable improvement with respect to standard discretization approaches

Performance of explicit and IMEX MRI multirate methods on complex reactive flow problems within modern parallel adaptive structured grid frameworks

Large-scale multiphysics simulations are computationally challenging due to the coupling of multiple processes with widely disparate time scales. The advent of exascale computing systems exacerbates these challenges, since these enable ever increasing size and complexity. Recently, there has been renewed interest in developing multirate methods as a means to handle the large range of time scales, as these methods may afford greater accuracy and efficiency than more traditional approaches of using IMEX and low-order operator splitting schemes. However, there have been few performance studies that compare different classes of multirate integrators on complex application problems. We study the performance of several newly developed multirate infinitesimal (MRI) methods, implemented in the SUNDIALS solver package, on two reacting flow model problems built on structured mesh frameworks. The first model revisits the work of Emmet et al. (2014) on a compressible reacting flow problem with complex chemistry that is implemented using BoxLib but where we now include comparisons between a new explicit MRI scheme with the multirate spectral deferred correction (SDC) methods in the original paper. The second problem uses the same complex chemistry as the first problem, combined with a simplified flow model, but run at a large spatial scale where explicit methods become infeasible due to stability constraints. Two recently developed implicit-explicit MRI multirate methods are tested. These methods rely on advanced features of the AMReX framework on which the model is built, such as multilevel grids and multilevel preconditioners. The results from these two problems show that MRI multirate methods can offer significant performance benefits on complex multiphysics application problems and that these methods may be combined with advanced spatial discretization to compound the advantages of both

IMplicit-EXplicit Formulations for Discontinuous Galerkin Non-Hydrostatic Atmospheric Models

This work presents IMplicit-EXplicit (IMEX) formulations for discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretizations of the compressible Euler equations governing non-hydrostatic atmospheric flows. In particular, we show two different IMEX formulations that not only treat the stiffness due to the governing dynamics but also the domain discretization. We present these formulations for two different equation sets typically employed in atmospheric modeling. For both equation sets, efficient Schur complements are derived and the challenges and remedies for deriving them are discussed. The performance of these IMEX formulations of different orders are investigated on both 2D (box) and 3D (sphere) test problems and shown to achieve their theoretical rates of convergence and their efficiency with respect to both mesoscale and global applications are presented