The Scalable Modeling System: a High-level Alternative to Mpi

A directive-based parallelization tool called the Scalable Modeling System (SMS) is described. The user inserts directives in the form of comments into existing Fortran code. SMS translates the code and directives into a parallel version that runs efficiently on both shared and distributed memory high-performance computing platforms. SMS provides tools to support partial parallelization and debugging that significantly decreases code parallelization time. The performance of an SMS parallelized version of the Eta model is compared to the operational version running at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP).