Abstract
The Large Atmospheric Computation on the Earth Simulator (LACES) project is a joint initiative between Canadian and Japanese meteorological services and academic institutions that focuses on the high resolution simulation of Hurricane Earl (1998). The unique aspect of this effort is the extent of the computational domain, which covers all of North America and Europe with a grid spacing of 1 km. The Canadian Mesoscale Compressible Community (MC2) model is shown to parallelize effectively on the Japanese Earth Simulator (ES) supercomputer; however, even using the extensive computing resources of the ES Center (ESC), the full simulation for the majority of Hurricane Earl's lifecycle takes over eight days to perform and produces over 5.2 TB of raw data. Preliminary diagnostics show that the results of the LACES simulation for the tropical stage of Hurricane Earl's lifecycle compare well with available observations for the storm. Further studies involving advanced diagnostics have commenced, taking advantage of the uniquely large spatial extent of the high resolution LACES simulation to investigate multiscale interactions in the hurricane and its environment. It is hoped that these studies will enhance our understanding of processes occurring within the hurricane and between the hurricane and its planetary-scale environment.
Highlights
This paper documents a meteorological study in computational fluid dynamics undertaken on a state of the art supercomputing platform
We found that a subdomain shape of 500 × 50 achieves a good compromise between computational load, communication and memory size to fit on a single processor
Despite the large domain size of 11000 × 8640 × 51, the MC2 model achieved a parallelization ratio of 0.9999:1 and occupied over 75% of the ES Center (ESC) resources to run at a rate of 9.9 TFlop
Summary
This paper documents a meteorological study in computational fluid dynamics undertaken on a state of the art supercomputing platform. / Large atmospheric computation on the earth simulator: The LACES project tems This operational challenge, coupled with uncertainties in the initial state of the atmosphere that render deterministic interpretation of the fine-scale structures in LES results questionable, makes forecasting on LES scales impractical at the current time on the sizes of domains required for numerical forecasting guidance. The synoptic scale modeling systems commonly used in operational NWP to provide numerical guidance to weather forecasters use a variety of parameterization schemes to represent the effects of unresolved subgrid scale processes on the resolved flow. The primary meteorological objective of this collaborative project (LACES – Large Atmospheric Calculation on the Earth Simulator) is to create a high resolution benchmark dataset on which to base diagnostic studies aimed at improving our understanding of the lifecycle of a complex hurricane.
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