Program was a CHAMMP at uniting climate models, powerful computers
Posted June 18, 2007
It’s impossible, of course, to bring the outdoors into a laboratory
for experiments. That’s why scientists rely on computer models to predict long-range
climate change.
But those projections are only as good as the models producing them. In the early 1990s, CHAMMP – Computer Hardware, Advanced Mathematics and Model Physics – improved them both.
Started by the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research, CHAMMP was designed to rapidly advance the science of long-range climate prediction.
With additional support from DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), CHAMMP brought climate modeling into the world of high-performance computing. It put models on the latest parallel computers, which divide complex problems among multiple processors for faster solutions.
CHAMMP “has the legacy of bringing DOE lab experts on computational fluid dynamics (CFD), numerical methods, and computer science into the climate modeling community,” says David Bader of DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Bader directed CHAMMP and now is chief scientist for its successor, the Climate Change Prediction Program.
CFD models fluid flow, such as air movement. Numerical methods convert complex phenomena into algorithms – mathematical recipes – computers use to simulate those phenomena.
In the early 1990s, CHAMMP helped develop a leading U.S. climate representation, the Parallel Climate Model or PCM, one of two predecessors to the current Community Climate System Model, Version 3 (CCSM).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considered data from the CCSM and other models before issuing its April 2007 report confirming global warming.
CCSM is still a leading model – and it’s about to get better. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory is testing it to run with unprecedented detail on the IBM Blue Gene/L, one of the world’s most powerful computers.
That step is traceable to CHAMMP.
