International Project Readies Climate Models for Exascale Era

by Michael Feldman,  HPC Wire

The Enabling Climate Simulation (ECS) at Extreme Scale project was created to explore how to efficiently run climate models on future exascale systems and obtain suitable results.

The project has a threefold concentration on completing models with correct results despite frequent system failures, leveraging hierarchical computers with hardware accelerators near their peak performance, and operating efficient simulations with 1 billion threads.

The project is a collaborative venture between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) via their Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing. INRIA’s Franck Cappello says research ideas will be tested on various available high-performance computing systems, such as IBM’s Blue Gene P and Q and Blue Waters.

“We believe that what we will learn by testing our improvements on these machines will help us to better prepare climate code for exascale,” Cappello says. He also says that ECS will cover resilience from multiple complementary strategies, including resilient climate simulation algorithms, new programming extensions for resilience, and new fault tolerant protocols for uncoordinated checkpointing and partial restart.

UIUC’s Mark Snir says the degree of climate change that will have occurred by the time the first exascale systems emerge perhaps means that the focus of ECS will have to be one of amelioration rather than remediation. Article