Abstract
The Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) version 5 includes a spectral element dynamical core option from NCAR's High-Order Method Modeling Environment. It is a continuous Galerkin spectral finite-element method designed for fully unstructured quadrilateral meshes. The current configurations in CAM are based on the cubed-sphere grid. The main motivation for including a spectral element dynamical core is to improve the scalability of CAM by allowing quasi-uniform grids for the sphere that do not require polar filters. In addition, the approach provides other state-of-the-art capabilities such as improved conservation properties. Spectral elements are used for the horizontal discretization, while most other aspects of the dynamical core are a hybrid of well-tested techniques from CAM's finite volume and global spectral dynamical core options. Here we first give an overview of the spectral element dynamical core as used in CAM. We then give scalability and performance results from CAM running with three different dynamical core options within the Community Earth System Model, using a pre-industrial time-slice configuration. We focus on high-resolution simulations, using 1/4 degree, 1/8 degree, and T341 spectral truncation horizontal grids.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 74-89 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2012 |
Funding
We thank Jamison Daniel at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for producing Figure 8 . As this work has been co-authored by contractors of the U.S. Government under contracts No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 and No. DE-AC52-07NA27344, the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This work was supported by the DOE BER SciDAC 06-13194, A Scalable and Extensible Earth System Model . Work by AAM was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. Work by PHW and KJE was sponsored by the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research and by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, both in the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC. This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357 and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Office of Biological and Environmental Research | |
| National Science Foundation | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | BER SciDAC 06-13194 |
| Office of Science | |
| Advanced Scientific Computing Research | |
| Argonne National Laboratory | DE-AC02-06CH11357 |
| Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | DE-AC52-07NA27344 |
Keywords
- atmospheric modeling
- dynamical core
- global circulation model
- parallel scalability
- spectral elements