CSE Symposium Keynote

John Drake
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

TITLE: Simulation of Climate and Development of Earth System Models

DATE: Thursday, April 13, 2006
TIME: 3:00 P.M.
PLACE: 2240 DCL
1304 W. Springfield Ave., Urbana, IL

ABSTRACT

The role of high end computing in climate simulation is well established by over three decades of experience. As we move toward petascale computing there will be continued emphasis on climate model development and international collaboration in the scientific study of climate. Among the challenges for the development of next generation climate models are the complexity of coupling multi-scale processes and dynamic component models in a simulation that encompasses several centuries. Algorithmic advances in the calculation of atmospheric and oceanic flows must be incorporated along with parallel decompositions that allow scaling to tens of thousands of processors. Current climate models include atmosphere, ocean, land and sea ice components and effectively utilize hundreds of processors. New capabilities to couple tropospheric chemistry, dynamic vegetation and ocean ecosystems with full carbon and chemical feedbacks are now being developed. The path for integration of these diverse components into a common simulation framework, such as the Community Climate System Model, while still improving the fundamental physical representations of climate in the model, will be discussed. Computational performance and a sampling of IPCC simulation results will be presented.