Climate Computing: The State of Play

Climate models represent a large variety of processes on different time and space scalesâa canonical example of multiphysics, multiscale modeling. In addition, the system is physically characterized by sensitive dependence on initial conditions and natural stochastic variability, with very long integrations needed to extract signals of climate change. Weak scaling, I/O, and memory-bound multiphysics codes present particular challenges to computational performance. The author presents trends in climate science that are driving models toward higher resolution, greater complexity, and larger ensembles, all of which present computing challenges. He also discusses the prospects for adapting these models to novel hardware and programming models.