The NCAR Community Climate Model (CCM) is one of the major climate models in use today in climate change research. Developed in the late 1970s on conventional vector-sequential supercomputers, CCM has slowly outstripped computing capacity as demands increase for finer resolutions, longer time scales, and more sophisticated physical parameterizations. Under the U.S. Department of Energy CHAMMP (Computer Hardware, Advanced Mathematics, and Model Physics) Initiative, Argonne, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a parallel version, called PCCM2. PCCM2 is currently being used for climate simulations on parallel computers such as the IBM SP1 and Intel Paragon. A slide show describes work on the IBM SP1.
PCCM2 incorporates parallel algorithms for the spectral transform method, semi Lagrangian transport, load balancing, and input/output. Some of these algorithms are incorporated in the PSTSWM testbed code which was developed to permit experimentation with alternative approaches.
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