High-performance climate system modeling using a domain and task decomposition message-passing approach

We have developed a climate system modeling framework (CSMF) for high-performance systems, designed to schedule and couple multiple physics simulation packages in a flexible and transportable manner. Some of the major packages in the CSMF include models of atmospheric and oceanic circulation and chemistry, land surface and sea ice processes, and trace gas biogeochemistry. Parallelism is achieved through both domain decomposition and process-level concurrency, with data transfer and synchronization accomplished through message-passing. Both machine transportability and architecture-dependent optimization are handled through libraries and conditional compile directives. Preliminary experiments with the CSMF have been executed on a number of high-performance platforms, including the Intel Paragon, the TMC CM-5 and the Meiko CS-2, and we are in the very early stages of optimization. Progress to date (1994) is presented