Climate Models Yield Impressive Early Results on ORNL's new IBM SP

Four climate codes of significant interest to OBER have been ported to the IBM SP with very promising performance.


Shallow water test


POP ocean run


T170 atmosphere run

  • PSTSWM: the spectral transform shallow water model used for benchmarking and performance portability

    Best serial performance with 280 MFlops, ~40% of processor peak

  • PCCM3.2: the 2-d parallel decompostion of the Community Climate Model developed jointly by ORNL, NCAR and ANL

    Gets 3.4 GFlops on 64 processors at T42L18 resolution (22.4 seconds per model day) and 4.1 GFlops on 64 processors at T170L18 resolution (867 seconds per model day)

  • CCM3.6.6: latest release of the NCAR Community Climate Model

    This model is being used to develop and refine the parallel programming paradigm for future atmospheric models. Current testing includes a distributed/shared memory hybrid.

  • PCM: the Parallel Climate Model developed for DOE by Warren Washington's group at NCAR

    This coupled model includes CCM3.2 for atmosphere and POP for ocean as well as ice and land surface models. At T42L18 resolution (2x2 degrees POP resolution) one model day completes in 50 seconds on 32 processors.

    Results are being shared with our partners at NCAR, PNNL, and Sandia, and with other OBER researchers.