Lower precision for higher accuracy: Precision and resolution exploration for shallow water equations

Accurate forecasts of future climate with numerical models of atmosphere and ocean are of vital importance. However, forecast quality is often limited by the available computational power. This paper investigates the acceleration of a C-grid shallow water model through the use of reduced precision targeting FPGA technology. Using a double-gyre scenario, we show that the mantissa length of variables can be reduced to 14 bits without affecting the accuracy beyond the error inherent in the model. Our reduced precision FPGA implementation runs 5.4 times faster than a double precision FPGA implementation, and 12 times faster than a multi-threaded CPU implementation. Moreover, our reduced precision FPGA implementation uses 39 times less energy than the CPU implementation and can compute a 100×100 grid for the same energy that the CPU implementation would take for a 29×29 grid.