HPCwire: Petascale Computing to Advance Climate Research

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April 18, 2008

Petascale Computing to Advance Climate Research

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From the birth of HPC, climate research has had a voracious appetite for computing resources. John Drake, chief computational scientist for the Climate End Station at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, explains what petascale computing will do to help feed this hunger and how the lab's work supports the mission of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

HPCwire: First, what is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and what is its main goal?

John Drake: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to scientifically assess the global risk of climate change, its potential impact, and options for mitigation. Since that time the IPCC has published four climate change assessments, and a fifth assessment is scheduled for publication in 2013.

HPCwire: What does Oak Ridge National Laboratory have to do with the IPCC and climate research?

Drake: As the Department of Energy's largest science and energy laboratory and a significant contributor to the fourth IPCC assessment, ORNL has been selected by the DOE and the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as a Climate End Station (CES) to help with the fifth IPCC assessment. Warren Washington of NCAR is chief scientist for the CES and I'm chief computational scientist.

HPCwire: Can you provide a brief overview of the Climate End Station?

Drake: Sure. The CES is a vehicle for engaging the broader science interests of the climate community with focus on the contribution of high performance computing. Specifically the CES helps to organize and coordinate the computational efforts -- from the perspectives of both development of scalable climate modeling software to prioritization and allocation of computer time. It includes a mechanism to manage computer allocations awarded by DOE through their INCITE program. Imagine everything that has to happen to develop projects and to do science along the way. That requires lots of computer time and lots of decisions about where to go next. The primary software that is developed and used by the climate community is called the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) and it is also a joint effort involving a broad collaborative community. DOE allocates computing resources for climate studies, and CES was put in place as a value-added organization, to give structure on top of individual allocations, to choose priorities, help to schedule projects, and determine what development and goals need to be met to keep to the schedule. The CES chooses priorities for our 20-million node-hour allocation and makes sure that the development for the IPCC assessment is on schedule.

As I mentioned, Warren Washington is the science PI on this. There's an executive board that advises Warren on who's ready to do what, when. Through INCITE we applied for a very large computer allocation across systems at ORNL, NERSC and ANL and were fortunate to receive an award commensurate with the needs and goals of the climate community. We're targeting things related to climate change and the role of carbon, versus broad climate science.

HPCwire: What is the process of creating an IPCC assessment?

Drake: For the first three years of the five-year assessment cycle, we're primarily concerned with determining what areas to study, tracking HPC advances so we know how detailed our models can be, deploying the most current HPC technology, and creating and testing the actual models. Then we freeze the models and spend the fourth year running simulations and gathering data for the different scenarios. In the fifth year, we write the papers that report our results and have those papers reviewed by different working groups within the IPCC community and by a variety of government agencies. The result is an assessment that includes thousands of pages of peer-reviewed results of climate change models.

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