Automatic performance tuning for Albany Land Ice

Accurate simulation of the evolution of polar ice-sheets requires a massive amount of computational power. In order to take advantage of the newest generation of supercomputing clusters, the Albany Land Ice code has been modernized for performance portability across a variety of parallel architectures, with a focus on enabling end-to -end GPU capability. Albany uses a multigrid preconditioning approach for solving linear systems via performance portable smoothers from the Trilinos package Ifpack2. Since the Albany Land Ice code is constantly evolving and both Albany and Trilinos are in constant development, it is likely that the optimal choice of solver parameters will change over time. It is therefore critical to have an automatic performance tuning framework to ensure that the best possible performance is maintained. Toward this effect, we have developed an automatic performance tuning framework to determine the best fine-and coarse-grid smoothing algorithms and parameters. We treat the underlying performance model of the linear solve as a black box and use the python-based GPTune Bayesian optimization library to determine the optimal smoother choice and parameters. Using this approach, we have found smoothers and their corresponding parameters that result in, on average, 1.2 times faster, and up to 1.5 times faster solve-times than our manually -tuned parameters. We also show that the proposed auto-tuning approach produces reliably better parameters than naive black box optimization techniques like random search for a given function evaluation budget. By implementing our tuning framework in the Python-based workflow management tool parsl, we also ensure that we efficiently use available computing resources during the tuning process and avoid unnecessary long wait times in computing cluster job queues.(c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.