Climate system modeling on massively parallel systems: LDRD Project 95-ERP-47 final report
Global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss are some of the major climate-related issues presently being addressed by climate and environmental scientists. Because unexpected changes in the climate could have significant effect on our economy, it is vitally important to improve the scientific basis for understanding and predicting the earth`s climate. The impracticality of modeling the earth experimentally in the laboratory together with the fact that the model equations are highly nonlinear has created a unique and vital role for computer-based climate experiments. However, today`s computer models, when run at desired spatial and temporal resolution and physical complexity, severely overtax the capabilities of our most powerful computers. Parallel processing offers significant potential for attaining increased performance and making tractable simulations that cannot be performed today. The principal goals of this project have been to develop and demonstrate the capability to perform large-scale climate simulations on high-performance computing systems (using methodology that scales to the systems of tomorrow), and to carry out leading-edge scientific calculations using parallelized models. The demonstration platform for these studies has been the 256-processor Cray-T3D located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Our plan was to undertake an ambitious program in optimization, proof-of-principle and scientific study. These goals have been met. We are now regularly using massively parallel processors for scientific study of the ocean and atmosphere, and preliminary parallel coupled ocean/atmosphere calculations are being carried out as well. Furthermore, our work suggests that it should be possible to develop an advanced comprehensive climate system model with performance scalable to the teraflops range. 9 refs., 3 figs.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 491858
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-ID-126050; ON: DE97052051
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: Dec 1996
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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