Kilometer-scale Earth modeling has supercomputers SCREAM under limits

To understand the physically coupled cycles of water, energy, and carbon, simulating the Earth system at kilometer-scale resolution is now a critical technical requirement. Achieving this demands a throughput of at least 100 simulated days per day, a threshold pushing the limits of current high-performance computing. The German effort is the Icosahedral Nonhydrostatic (ICON) model; however, researchers suggest a fundamental shift in ICON’s development is needed to thrive on European supercomputers like JUPITER, with breakthroughs made possible by the Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM) and a Kokkos-based approach. ICON Achieves 1.25km Global Simulation with OpenACC on JUPITER Taking full advantage of NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper superchips on both Alps and JUPITER, researchers achieved the first…