David Leutwyler from ETH Zurich gave this talk at the 2017 Chaos Communication Congress. “The representation of thunderstorms (deep convection) and rain showers in climate models represents a major challenge, as this process is usually approximated with semi-empirical parameterizations due to the lack of appropriate computational resolution. Climate simulations using kilometer-scale horizontal resolution allow explicitly resolving deep convection and thus allow for an improved representation of the water cycle. We present a set of such simulations covering Europe and global computational domains.”
Video: Weather and Climate Modeling at Convection-Resolving Resolution
January 14, 2018 by Leave a Comment
GPUs Power Near-global Climate Simulation at 1 km Resolution
October 12, 2017 by Leave a Comment
A new peer-reviewed paper is reportedly causing a stir in the climatology community. “The best hope for reducing long-standing global climate model biases, is through increasing the resolution to the kilometer scale. Here we present results from an ultra-high resolution non-hydrostatic climate model for a near-global setup running on the full Piz Daint supercomputer on 4888 GPUs.”
Panasas Upgrades JASMIN Super-Data-Cluster Facility to 20PB
September 26, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Today Panasas announced that the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (SFTC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK has expanded its JASMIN super-data-cluster with an additional 1.6 petabytes of Panasas ActiveStor storage, bringing total storage capacity to 20PB. This expansion required the formation of the largest realm of Panasas storage worldwide, which is managed by a single systems administrator. Thousands of users worldwide find, manipulate and analyze data held on JASMIN, which processes an average of 1-3PB of data every day.
Supercomputers turn the clock back on Storms with “Hindcasting”
July 25, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Researchers are using supercomputers at LBNL to determine how global climate change has affected the severity of storms and resultant flooding. “The group used the publicly available model, which can be used to forecast future weather, to “hindcast” the conditions that led to the Sept. 9-16, 2013 flooding around Boulder, Colorado.”
Interview: Dr. Christoph Schär on Escaping the Data Avalanche for Climate Modeling
July 13, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“There are large efforts towards refining the horizontal resolution of climate models to O(1 km) with the intent to represent convective clouds explicitly rather than using semi-empirical parameterizations. This refinement would move the governing equations closer to first principles and is expected to reduce the uncertainties of climate models. However, the output volume of climate simulations would dramatically grow, and storing it for later analysis would likely become impractical, due to limited I/O bandwidth and mass-storage capacity. In this presentation we discuss possible solutions to this challenge.”
Evolving Storage and Cyber Infrastructure at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation
May 27, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Ellen Salmon from NASA gave this talk at the 2017 MSST conference. “This talk will describe recent developments at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation, which is funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and supports the specialized data storage and computational needs of weather, ocean, and climate researchers, as well as astrophysicists, heliophysicists, and planetary scientists.”
Video: Tracing Ocean Salinity for Global Climate Models
January 15, 2017 by Leave a Comment
In this visualization, ocean temperatures and salinity are tracked over the course of a year. Based on data from global climate models, these visualizations aid our understanding of the physical processes that create the Earth’s climate, and inform predictions about future changes in climate. “The water’s saltiness, or salinity, plays a significant role in this ocean heat engine, Harrison said. Salt makes the water denser, helping it to sink. As the atmosphere warms due to global climate change, melting ice sheets have the potential to release tremendous amounts of fresh water into the oceans.”
SGI Opens European Research Centre at ICHEC in Ireland
August 30, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Today SGI announced a significant investment in extreme scale software research at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), a top European center. The investment highlights the commitment of SGI to the European software research community. These resources, including SGI application software and supercomputing hardware expertise, will assist scientists as they explore issues related to climate change, weather forecasting, and environmental research among many other topics.
Video: A NASA Perspective on El Niño
July 16, 2016 by Leave a Comment
In this video, Steven Pawson discussed how NASA uses computer models to build up a complete three-dimensional picture of El Niño in the ocean and atmosphere. Pawson is an atmospheric scientist and the chief of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Challenges for Climate and Weather Prediction in the Era of Heterogeneous Architectures
June 19, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Beth Wingate from the University of Exeter presented this talk at the PASC16 conference in Switzerland. “For weather or climate models to achieve exascale performance on next-generation heterogeneous computer architectures they will be required to exploit on the order of million- or billion-way parallelism. This degree of parallelism far exceeds anything possible in today’s models even though they are highly optimized. In this talk I will discuss the mathematical issue that leads to the limitations in space- and time-parallelism for climate and weather prediction models – oscillatory stiffness in the PDE.”
