Berkeley Lab - Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Time:

1:00pm-2:00pm

Location:

Building 50A, 5132 Conference Room

Seminar Speaker:

Ross Heikes
Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

Title:

Continuing Development of Models Based on Icosahedral Geodesic Grids at CSU

Abstract:

The atmospheric modeling group at Colorado State University (CSU) has adopted the icosahedral geodesic grid with Vorononi cells for its global models. The icosahedral grid eliminates the difficulties present in cartesian grids at the poles due to the convergence of meridians in spherical coordinates. The icosahedral grid provides approximately homogenous resolution and isotropic distributing of grid points over the entire sphere.

Our approach to parallelization is based on a decomposition of the spherical domain. These pieces of the global domain are called subdomains. We will discuss our strategy to efficiently distribute subdomains to processes and communication between subdomains in the parallel model.

We are preparing a Global Cloud Resolving Model (GCRM) with a resolution of about 2 km. The resulting grid will have about 167 million grid points in the horizontal with roughly 50 levels in the vertical. We will discuss our plans for parallel I/O and archiving of data from this model.

This is joint work with Celal S. Konor and David Randall.

Sponsor of Seminar:

Tony Drummond

Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov