High-Order Finite Element Methods for Parallel Atmospheric Modeling

Abstract

High-order finite element methods for the atmospheric shallow water equations are reviewed. The accuracy and efficiency of nodal continuous and discontinuous Galerkin spectral elements are evaluated using the standard test problems proposed by Williamson et al (1992). The relative merits of strong-stability preserving (SSP) explicit Runge-Kutta and multistep time discretizations are discussed. Distributed memory MPI implementations are compared on the basis of the total computation time required, sustained performance and parallel scalability. Because a discontinuous Galerkin method permits the overlap of computation and communication, higher sustained execution rates are possible at large processor counts.