Toward a high performance distributed memory climate model

As part of a long range plan to develop a comprehensive climate systems modeling capability, the authors have taken the atmospheric general circulation model originally developed by Arakawa and collaborators at UCLA and have recast it in a portable, parallel form. The code uses an explicit time-advance procedure on a staggered three-dimensional Eulerian mesh. They have implemented a two-dimensional latitude/longitude domain decomposition message passing strategy. Both dynamic memory management and interprocess communication are handled with macro constructs that are preprocessed prior to compilation. The code can be moved about a variety of platforms, including massively parallel processors, workstation clusters, and vector processors, with a mere change of three parameters. Performance on the various platforms as well as issues associated with coupling different models for major components of the climate system are discussed.<
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