arXiv subjects

Mauro Bianco

Publications and source records attributed to Mauro Bianco.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Integrating a Python Dynamical core into ICON

The transition of Earth-system models to exascale is often hindered by rigid, monolithic Fortran codebases and maintenance-heavy compiler directives. While high-level DSLs offer a solution, they frequently fail due to cumbersome integration. We present the integration of a Python-based ICON dynamical core into the original Fortran simulation code. Leveraging the GT4Py DSL and the Data-Centric (DaCe) optimization framework, we demonstrate that high-level Python can be seamlessly integrated into legacy infrastructure without performance loss. Our results challenge the assumption that Python orchestration introduces prohibitive HPC overhead. In production-grade global simulations, our Python dynamical core achieves a 20--30\% performance improvement over the highly-optimized Fortran+OpenACC implementation, with a 10\% improvement on the total time for a coupled setup. Driven by advanced data-flow optimizations and automated kernel fusion, this approach replaces hardware-entangled directives by generating optimized device code from a single, portable Python source. This work proves that Python can provide a sustainable, efficient, and hardware-agnostic future for global climate modeling.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

GT4Py: High Performance Stencils for Weather and Climate Applications using Python

All major weather and climate applications are currently developed using languages such as Fortran or C++. This is typical in the domain of high performance computing (HPC), where efficient execution is an important concern. Unfortunately, this approach leads to implementations that intermix optimizations for specific hardware architectures with the high-level numerical methods that are typical for the domain. This leads to code that is verbose, difficult to extend and maintain, and difficult to port to different hardware architectures. Here, we propose a different strategy based on GT4Py (GridTools for Python). GT4Py is a Python framework to write weather and climate applications that includes a high-level embedded domain specific language (DSL) to write stencil computations. The toolchain integrated in GT4Py enables automatic code-generation,to obtain the performance of state-of-the-art C++ and CUDA implementations. The separation of concerns between the mathematical definitions and the actual implementations allows for performance portability of the computations on a wide range of computing architectures, while being embedded in Python allows easy access to the tools of the Python ecosystem to enhance the productivity of the scientists and facilitate integration in complex workflows. Here, the initial release of GT4Py is described, providing an overview of the current state of the framework and performance results showing how GT4Py can outperform pure Python implementations by orders of magnitude.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2012

A Generic Library for Stencil Computations

In this era of diverse and heterogeneous computer architectures, the programmability issues, such as productivity and portable efficiency, are crucial to software development and algorithm design. One way to approach the problem is to step away from traditional sequential programming languages and move toward domain specific programming environments to balance between expressivity and efficiency. In order to demonstrate this principle, we developed a domain specific C++ generic library for stencil computations, like PDE solvers. The library features high level constructs to specify computation and allows the development of parallel stencil computations with very limited effort. The high abstraction constructs (like do_all and do_reduce) make the program shorter and cleaner with increased contextual information for better performance exploitation. The results show good performance from Windows multicores, to HPC clusters and machines with accelerators, like GPUs.

cs.MS↗