Performance of the Community Earth System Model

The Community Earth System Model (CESM), released in June 2010, incorporates new physical process and new numerical algorithm options, significantly enhancing simulation capabilities over its predecessor, the June 2004 release of the Community Climate System Model. CESM also includes enhanced performance tuning options and performance portability capabilities. This paper describes performance and performance scaling on both the Cray XT5 and the IBM BG/P for four representative production simulations, varying both problem size and enabled physical processes. The paper also describes preliminary performance results for high resolution simulations using over 200,000 processor cores, indicating the promise of ongoing work in numerical algorithms and where further work is required.