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

  • Authors:

  • John M. Dennis;Mariana Vertenstein;Patrick H. Worley;Arthur A. Mirin;Anthony P. Craig;Robert Jacob;Sheri Mickelson

  • Affiliations:

  • National Center for Atmospheric Research, Computer and Information Systems Laboratory, USA;National Center for Atmospheric Research, Earth System Laboratory, USA;Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Computer Science and Mathematics Division, USA;Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Center for Applied Scientific Computing, USA;National Center for Atmospheric Research, Earth System Laboratory, USA;Argonne National Laboratory, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, USA;Argonne National Laboratory, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, USA

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

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.