Argonne National Laboratory
Mathematics and Computer Science Division
SEMINAR

DATE: Friday, January 12, 2001
TIME: 2:30 pm	
PLACE: Building 221 Conference Room A216 
	Also at U of C Research Institute via the AG
GUEST SPEAKER: John Michalakes, Argonne National Laboratory and Mesoscale
and Microscale Meteorology Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research. 

TALK TITLE: Performance and maintainability:  dealing with these
conflicting concerns in large community weather models. 



ABSTRACT: 
Computational requirements for atmospheric modeling, one of the first 
applications of scientific computing, remains a challenge today. Soon, the 
advent of tera-scale computer systems comprising hundreds or thousands of 
parallel processors will enable simulation of complex phenomena at 
unprecedented resolutions and scales. But only if scientific software is 
able to exploit these systems while at the same time preserving the 
considerable and ongoing investment in large community models. This 
requires attention to maintainability, extensibility and 
performance-portability across an increasingly diverse computer 
architecture landscape, comprising both vector and cache-based processors 
configured for shared- and distributed-memory parallelism. This talk 
presents approaches to model software design and tools for dealing with the 
conflicting concerns of performance and software maintainability in two 
large numerical weather prediction community models: the 
Penn State/NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5) and the new Weather Research and 
Forecast (WRF) model.

  
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