For many decades, computational speed has been the main limit on the sophistication of climate models. Climate modelers have become one of the most demanding groups of users for high performance computing, and access to faster and faster machines drives much of the progress, permitting higher resolution models and more earth system processes being explicitly resolved in the models. But from my visits to NCAR, MPI-M and IPSL this summer, I’m learning that growth in volumes of data handled is increasingly a dominant factor. The volume of data generated from today’s models has grown so much that supercomputer facilities find it hard to handle.<\/p>\n
Currently, the labs are busy with the\u00a0CMIP5<\/a> runs that will form one of the major inputs to the next IPCC assessment report. See here for a list of the data outputs required<\/a> from the models (and note that the requirements were last changed on Sept 17, 2010 -well after most centers have started their runs; after all \u00a0it will take months to complete the runs, and the target date for submitting the data is the end of this year)<\/p>\n Climate modelers have requirements that are somewhat different from most other users of supercomputing facilities anyway:<\/p>\n Everyone seems to have underestimated the volumes of data generated from these CMIP5 runs. The implication is that data throughput rates are becoming a more important factor than processor speed, which may mean that climate computing centres require a different architecture than most high performance computing centres offer.<\/p>\n\n