Computational performance of ultra-high-resolution capability in the Community Earth System Model

Abstract

With the fourth release of the Community Climate System Model, the ability to perform ultra-high-resolution climate simulations is now possible, enabling eddy-resolving ocean and sea-ice models to be coupled to a finite-volume atmosphere model for a range of atmospheric resolutions. This capability was made possible by enabling the model to use large scale parallelism, which required a significant refactoring of the software infrastructure. We describe the scalability of two ultra-high-resolution coupled configurations on leadership class computing platforms. We demonstrate the ability to utilize over 30,000 processor cores on a Cray XT5 system and over 60,000 cores on an IBM Blue Gene/P system to obtain climatologically relevant simulation rates for these configurations.