The Model Coupling Toolkit: A New Fortran90 Toolkit for Building Multiphysics Parallel Coupled Models

TLDR

Multiphysics simulations involve interacting models that pose interdisciplinary, computational, and algorithmic challenges, especially when parallelized on commodity clusters, creating a complex coupling problem. The study defines the parallel coupling problem and outlines software requirements to simplify building parallel coupled models. The authors present the Model Coupling Toolkit (MCT), a Fortran90 package that implements a programming model with illustrative code examples to meet these requirements. Results demonstrate MCT’s scalability, performance portability, and low coupling overhead.

Abstract

Many problems in science and engineering are best simulated as a set of mutually interacting models, resulting in a coupled or multiphysics model. These models present challenges stemming from their interdisciplinary nature and from their computational and algorithmic complexities. The computational complexity of individual models, combined with the popularity of the distributed-memory parallel programming model used on commodity micro-processor-based clusters, results in a parallel coupling problem when building a coupled model. We define and elucidate this problem and how it results in a set of requirements for software capable of simplifying the construction of parallel coupled models. We describe the package, the Model Coupling Toolkit (MCT), which we have developed to meet these general requirements and the specific requirements of a parallel climate model. We present the MCT programming model with illustrative code examples. We present representative results that measure MCT’s scalability, performance portability, and a proxy for coupling overhead.