Enabling Climate Simulation at Extreme Scale - ECS

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Felix Wolf
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: from 2011 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 200994957

Exascale systems will allow unprecedented reduction of the uncertainties in climate change predictions via ultra-high-resolution models, fewer simplifying assumptions, large climate ensembles, and simulation at scales needed to predict local effects. This is essential given the cost and consequences of inaction or wrong actions about climate change. To achieve this, we need careful co-design of future exascale systems and climate codes to handle lower reliability, increased heterogeneity, and increased importance of locality. Our effort will initiate an international collaboration of climate and computer scientists that will identify the main roadblocks and analyze and test initial solutions for the execution of climate codes at extreme scale. This work will provide guidance for the future evolution of climate codes. We will pursue research projects to handle known roadblocks to resilience, scalability, and use of accelerators, and we will organize international, interdisciplinary workshops to gather information and disseminate results. The global nature of the climate challenge and the magnitude of the task strongly favor an international collaboration. The consortium gathers senior and early career researchers from USA, France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Canada. To be successful, we assemble: • Leading experts on climate simulation, climate code developers, resilience, scalability at the system level, and performance optimization at the node level. • Teams working on four major climate codes (CESM1, EC-EARTH, ECSM, NICAM).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants