HPCwire: Visualizing This

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February 08, 2008

Visualizing This

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NERSC's new Cray and analytics experts produce animations of climate models with fine details

A team of climate researchers who obtained early access to NERSC's new Cray XT4 said the powerful system produced simulations that offered details of oceanic and atmospheric phenomena, results that were difficult to obtain from other supercomputers before.

At the DOE's behest, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) proposed a set of experiments using climate models with resolutions many times higher than those in the standard models, such as those used by the IPCC.

The high-resolution models offer not only a closer look at physical elements of the climate, such as tropical storms, but they also enable researchers to conduct a more in-depth analysis of climate change as higher-resolution phenomena in the ocean and atmosphere are resolved.

For years, scientists worldwide have relied on simulations with resolutions in the 100-kilometer range for studying forces that shape the oceans and the atmosphere. But the resolution isn't high enough to model details such as ocean vortices and clouds, phenomena that are critical for understanding regional climate variations. Developing a climate model is a computationally intensive task, and getting enough time on powerful supercomputers has always been a challenge.

GFDL scientists, located in Princeton, New Jersey, had developed models capable of modeling the global atmosphere at resolutions down to 5 km, and the ocean at resolutions between 10 km and 20 km. They also have designed experiments which generated 1 to 4 terabytes of data for every year of simulation. NERSC provided GFDL with the computation resources for this challenge by setting aside over 800,000 CPU hours on the new Cray XT4 named Franklin.

Franklin has nearly 20,000 processor cores and a top processing speed of more than 100 teraflops, making it one of the largest in the world. It arrived at NERSC early last year and passed rigorous testing, which was announced last November.

In addition to carrying out successful runs on Franklin, GFDL also received strong support from NERSC's Analytics Team in using animations to illustrate the results. Prabhat from the Analytics Team created a series of visual renderings of data that included sea surface temperatures and clouds and precipitations in different parts of the world.

"We are able to increase our models' resolutions because of our access to the NERSC machine. One of the results is we can see category 4 or 5 hurricanes in a 20-km model, and they are what we would expect to see in the real world," said V. Balaji, head of the Modeling Services Group at GFDL. Senior software developer Christopher Kerr at GFDL and other members of Balaji's team were responsible for enabling the software infrastructure to perform these scientific experiments. Richard Gerber, a NERSC consultant, resolved systemrelated issues so that the experiments could be performed on Franklin.

"The results of the visualization collaboration have been outstanding," Balaji added.

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