G8 Initiative: Collaborative Research: ECS: Enabling Climate Simulation at Extreme Scale

University Of Tennessee Knoxville, Knoxville TN

Investigators

Abstract

This NSF award to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville funds U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by the G8 Research Councils Initiative on Multilateral Research through the Interdisciplinary Program on Application Software towards Exascale Computing for Global Scale Issues. This is a pilot collaboration among the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Canadian National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR),and the United Kingdom Research Councils (RC-UK), supporting collaborative research projects selected on a competitive basis that are comprised of researchers from at least three of the partner countries. This interdisciplinary project across six countries focuses on three research topics that address limitations in numerical modeling of physics, chemistry and biology with the NCAR Community Earth System Model Version 1 (CESM1) and similar codes used by other countries. These research topics include new approaches to handle resilience, node level optimization and system level scalability. This research will enable the development of more scalable model ensembles. These will allow better evaluation of climate sensitivity and climate feedback processes, a better quantification of model uncertainty and a better understanding of the effects of natural variability. The project will provide essential knowledge toward scaling climate codes for exascale and thus reducing current uncertainties on climate evolution; it will foster interactions between computer scientists and climate scientists; will foster international collaborations in the area of climate simulations and exascale computing; and will educate a new generation of researchers that understand both the application domain of climate simulation and high-performance computing