Computational performance of ultra-high-resolution capability in the Community Earth System Model

JM Dennis, M Vertenstein, PH Worley… - … Journal of High …, 2012 - journals.sagepub.com
JM Dennis, M Vertenstein, PH Worley, AA Mirin, AP Craig, R Jacob, S Mickelson
The International Journal of High Performance Computing …, 2012journals.sagepub.com
With the fourth release of the Community Climate System Model, the ability to perform ultra-
high-resolution climate simulations is now possible, enabling eddy-resolving ocean and sea-
ice models to be coupled to a finite-volume atmosphere model for a range of atmospheric
resolutions. This capability was made possible by enabling the model to use large scale
parallelism, which required a significant refactoring of the software infrastructure. We
describe the scalability of two ultra-high-resolution coupled configurations on leadership …
With the fourth release of the Community Climate System Model, the ability to perform ultra-high-resolution climate simulations is now possible, enabling eddy-resolving ocean and sea-ice models to be coupled to a finite-volume atmosphere model for a range of atmospheric resolutions. This capability was made possible by enabling the model to use large scale parallelism, which required a significant refactoring of the software infrastructure. We describe the scalability of two ultra-high-resolution coupled configurations on leadership class computing platforms. We demonstrate the ability to utilize over 30,000 processor cores on a Cray XT5 system and over 60,000 cores on an IBM Blue Gene/P system to obtain climatologically relevant simulation rates for these configurations.
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