NERSC to Share Major Grant for Climate Model Research

DOE's Climate Change Prediction Program (CCPP, formerly CHAMMP) has awarded $3 million over 18 months to a multi-agency, multi-laboratory collaboration that aims to develop a modular, performance-portable Climate System Model. NERSC will receive $540,000 of that total.

Led by Ian Foster of Argonne National Laboratory, the collaboration includes NERSC's Chris Ding and nine other co-investigators from Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

NCAR scientists are working to merge two of the world's most advanced computer climate models, the Climate System Model (CSM) and the Parallel Climate Model (PCM). CSM achieves high performance on parallel vector computers, but was not designed to exploit scalable parallel architectures, and will not scale beyond 64 processors. PCM, developed with DOE support, was designed specifically for parallel systems. The merged CSM-2 will include the best features of both models.

The new R&D work will enable "plug and play" substitution of important modules, making it easier for scientists to improve individual components, and will develop a next-generation "coupler," the top-level model that organizes all the sub-models such as atmosphere, ocean, and sea ice. The result will be a model that performs well on a variety of computer architectures, producing more detailed results in less time.

NERSC has two tasks: to optimize input/output and to optimize the code for IBM SP and distributed scalable memory architectures. Helen He and a not-yet-hired researcher will work with Chris on the project. Chris hopes that climate model development will be a long-term growth area for NERSC, since there's more work than can be done in 18 months. Even more important, with the code optimized for the IBM SP, NERSC could play an even larger role as one of the main facilities for running climate models.