Project Details
Projekt
Icosahedral-grid Models for Exascale Earth System Simulations - ICOMEX
Subject Area
Software Engineering and Programming Languages
Term
from 2011 to 2015
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 200961186
The primary goal of this project is to prepare four state-of-the-art Earth system models (ESMs) based onicosahedral grids - one being operational since a few years, the others being at advanced stages of development -for future application on exascale computing platforms. Such computing capacity will, for example, be needed for global convection-resolving climate simulations. These will allow circumventing the long-standing problem of convection parameterization and its related limitations to the reliability of predicted climate trends, and will provide a much better basis for human adaptation measures than presently available. Among the existing options for ESM grids, icosahedral grids are likely the most promising way to obtain a high scalability up to a million cores because their relatively uniform mesh size allows combining them with explicit time-stepping schemes, which in turn avoid global communication and thus meet a major prerequisite for high scalability. In addition, icosahedral grids allow for a relatively straightforward implementation of variable-resolution grids, which are highly beneficial for a wide range of applications dealing with multi-scale interactions of atmospheric and/or ocean dynamics. Despite the general appropriateness of icosahedral grids for massively parallel computing, considerable research and development in suitable numerical methods as well as software layout is still needed. Addressing this issue based on a collaboration between atmospheric and ocean scientists, numerical mathematicians and softwareengineers will be the main goal of this project.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
