Enhancing the efficiency of Climate and Weather Simulation in High Performance Computing Environments

A central focus of NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) atmospheric general circulation modeling effort is the development of an atmospheric model suitable for data assimilation, weather forecasting, and climate simulation. Ongoing developments are focused on highly parallel processing, global simulations of increasing resolutions, and increased coupling of the earth system's process models. While model computation scales very well with number of available processors, a major constraining factor on the efficiency of these simulations is the input processing of Terabyte-size source data files used by the gridded component models. Our objective in this research is to increase the efficient use of CPU time associated with these simulations by paralleling I/O processing operations using an 'I/O Staging Server' which captures and makes available the required source data asynchronously with the simulation run. More efficient I/O for reading model restarts and boundary conditions, and writing model output and checkpoint files will free up processing resources that are currently idling during I/O. As a result, we will realize a significant increase both the number of models that can be involved in the simulation and the achievable resolutions of the grid components. It is estimated that currently up to 25% of a forecast run is consumed by I/O, a factor we think can be reduced by at least 50% or more through the use of State-of-the-art I/O processing approaches and supporting software infrastructure.

The results of this research, if successful, will have direct applicability to the Global Modeling and Assimilation office at the Goddard Space Flight Center. When validated and integrated as a part of the Earth System Modeling Framework/MAPL software application, it will have a significant impact on the CPU processing time required of the NCCS during climate and weather simulation runs of GEOS-5, and of GEOS-6 when that modeling environment evolution becomes available. As the NCCS user base increases, the results of this research will increase the efficiency of GMAO's climate/weather simulation process, thus freeing up resources for others' use and/or increasing the resolution potential of GMAO's gridded components.

The potential applications of this technology and approach include all High Performance Computing production environments working with extremely large input/results files, and multiprocessor tasking and utilization issues. Beyond Phase 2 we will make the technology available to all government agencies, will license to commercial entities, will provide consulting service to all on taking advantage of the newly developed technology. This technology is applicable beyond earth system models, and can include all multi-component fluid simulations including such varied envrionments such as aircraft aerodynamics, pollution cloud propagation, and internal combustion in gas turbines.

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