Program was a CHAMMP at uniting climate models, powerful computers

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Assembling a model

“CHAMMP was just one piece of DOE’s modeling program,” Bader says.  It “was the model development part, which was new because DOE hadn’t done that.”

One goal, Bader says, was to adapt models to run on ASCR-supported high-performance parallel computers then coming on line.  Among them were:

• The Thinking Machines CM2 and CM5, installed in 1989 and 1992, respectively, at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• The Cray C90 installed at DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in 1991 and at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 1996.
• The Intel Paragon installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1992.
• The IBM SP1 and SP2.  Argonne installed the SP1 in 1993 and upgraded it to an SP2 in 1995.  Oak Ridge took delivery on an SP2 in 1994.
• The Cray T3D installed at NCAR in 1994 and Cray T3E installed at the NERSC Center in 1996.

Considered cutting-edge at the time, each of the computers is puny by today’s standards, when parallel machines often have thousands of processors.

Researchers John Drake at Oak Ridge, Ian Foster at Argonne, and James Hack and Dave Williamson at NCAR developed the parallel computing version of NCAR’s Community Climate Model, an existing atmospheric General Circulation Model, or GCM.

With support from the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, DOE researchers John Dukowicz, Bob Malone and Rick Smith at Los Alamos reworked existing ocean General Circulation Model algorithms developed by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Bert Semtner.  The result: the Parallel Ocean Program (POP), which still is the CCSM’s ocean component.

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