New Exascale System for Earth Simulation Introduced

from HPCwire

The Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science in the Biological and Environmental Research Office, has been unveiled after four years of development.

The Earth, with its myriad interactions of atmosphere, oceans, land and ice components, presents an extraordinarily complex system for investigation. Earth system simulation involves solving approximations of physical, chemical and biological governing equations on spatial grids at resolutions that are as fine in scale as computing resources will allow. The full press release is on LLNL web site.

The E3SM project will reliably simulate aspects of earth system variability and project decadal changes that will critically impact the U.S. energy sector in the near future. These critical factors include a) regional air/water temperatures, which can strain energy grids; b) water availability, which affects power plant operations; c) extreme water-cycle events (e.g. floods and droughts), which impact infrastructure and bio-energy; and d) sea-level rise and coastal flooding, which threaten coastal infrastructure.

The goal of the project is to develop an earth system model (ESM) that has not been possible because of limitations in current computing technologies. Meeting this goal will require advances on three frontiers: 1) better resolving earth system processes through a strategic combination of developing new processes in the model, increased model resolution and enhanced computational performance; 2) representing more realistically the two-way interactions between human activities and natural processes, especially where these interactions affect U.S. energy needs; and 3) ensemble modeling to quantify uncertainty of model simulations and projections.

The E3SM release includes model code and documentation, and initial benchmark simulation results. The model simulates aspects of Earth system variability and will forecast decadal changes with a critical near-term impact on the U.S. energy sector. The project aims to create an Earth system model (ESM) previously impossible because of limitations in computing technologies. Eventually the E3SM project aims to use exascale machines, as E3SM proceeds in tandem with the DOE Exascale Computing Initiative (ECI). Read the report

DCL: Complex Event Processing was first developed at Stanford in the 1990’s to deal with the problems of analyzing the event-based simulations of large chip designs. It was later applied to many other event-driven problems for real-time analysis – often referred to today as event stream processing. It is interesting to see the development of CEP come full circle to this large-scale simulation analysis. There’s a lot fo CEP hidden in the workings of E3SM.