Simplified Ocean Models on the GPU

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation of three different simplified ocean models on a GPU (graphics processing unit) using Python and PyOpenCL. The three models are all based on the solving the shallow water equations on Cartesian grids, and our work is motivated by the aim of running very large ensembles of forecast models for fully nonlinear data assimilation. The models are the linearized shallow water equations, the non-linear shallow water equations, and the two-layer non-linear shallow water equations, respectively, and they contain progressively more physical properties of the ocean dynamics. We show how these models are discretized to run efficiently on a GPU, discuss how to implement them, and show some simulation results. The implementation is available online under an open source license, and may serve as a starting point for others to implement similar oceanographic models.