Abstract

December 1 , 2006

Title: Aqua-planet experiments with a spectral element GCM
Presented by: Stephen Thomas
Institute for Mathematics Applied to the Geosciences (IMAGe)
National Center for Atmospheric Research

Abstract

We describe an atmospheric general circulation model based on a spectral element discretization in the horizontal and finite differences in the vertical direction. The dynamical core has been coupled to a simplified physics package including a moist convective parameterization due to Emanuel Both the moist Held-Suarez and an idealized aqua-planet experiment proposed by Grabowski and Moncrieff were were run on the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer at up to 10 km horizontal resolution. Results obtained on a 32 rack system (65,536 processors, 183.5 TeraFlops peak) show sustained performance of 8.0 TeraFlops on 32,768 processors for the moist Held-Suarez test problem in coprocessor mode and 11.3 TeraFlops for an idealized aqua-planet simulation of tropical convection. We also report on recent progress in coupling the spectral element dynamical core to the full NCAR CAM physics package.

Co-sponsored with the department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.