EARLY EXPERIENCES WITH THE 360TF IBM BLUE GENE/L PLATFORM

Abstract

The High Order Method Modeling Environment is a scalable, spectral-element-based prototype for the Community Atmospheric Model component of the Community Climate System Model. The 3D moist primitive equations are solved on the cubed sphere with a hybrid pressure η vertical coordinate using an Emanuel convective parametrization for moist processes. Semi-implicit time integration, based on a preconditioned conjugate gradient solver, circumvents the time step restrictions associated with gravity waves. Benchmarks for two standard tests problems at 10 km horizontal resolution have been run on Blue Gene/L. Results obtained on a 32-rack Blue Gene/L system (65,536 processors, 183.5-teraflop peak) show sustained performance of 8.0 teraflops on 32,768 processors for the moist Held–Suarez test problem in coprocessor mode and 11.3 teraflops on 32,768 processors for the aquaplanet test problem, running in virtual node mode.