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DOE Pulse
  • Number 425  |
  • October 27, 2014

More haste, less waste

Scientists used a technique to shave time off computationally expensive global climate simulations.

Scientists used a technique to shave time
off computationally expensive global
climate simulations.

Like a sleek, modern sports car, a climate model has a complex computer engine running underneath. As the demand grows for the models to produce faster simulations with more details, the computer engine takes up more time and space. This computational cost edges some climate questions out of the nation’s limited number of supercomputers. Using a novel computational approach, scientists at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found a way to reduce the computational cost dramatically and get the climate answers hundreds of times faster.

The PNNL team calculated the climate simulations from a number of short simulations rather than from a single, multi-year simulation. Using the Community Atmosphere Model, they initialized the short simulations with different weather conditions so that they were independent runs, carried out simultaneously.

The new strategy provides equally reliable results as the conventional method but reduces the total computational time by a factor of ~15. The turnaround time is also greatly reduced, by a factor of several hundred. The scientists showed that such a dramatic improvement in efficiency will help extend the scope and depth of detail in climate and other investigations.

The DOE Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program, Earth System Modeling Program (ESM) for the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) project supported this research. PNNL’s Linus Pauling Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, also supported this project. Computing resources were provided by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

[Kristin Manke, 509.372.6011,
kristin.manke@pnnl.gov]