TITLE:

MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY EARTH SYSTEM MODELING AT THE PETASCALE AND BEYOND

DATE:

Friday, January 25th, 2008

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Rich Loft, Director of Technology Development, Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research

ABSTRACT:

Dramatic improvements in computing power, along with rapid advances in disk capacity, tape densities and network bandwidths, are transforming how our society generates and consumes information. Earth system science is no exception. The availability of observational data about our planet in digital form, coupled with once-unimaginable computer modeling capabilities, has allowed geoscientists to tackle a broad front of complex, interdisciplinary, grand challenge problems in new and more realistic ways. For example, climate scientists, once confined to low-resolution simulations using atmospheric general circulation models with prescribed sea surface temperatures, now work with fully dynamically coupled models of sea ice, ocean and land surface processes. In the future, additional processes, such as ocean and atmospheric chemistry, dynamic vegetation, and the carbon cycle will be included, and resolution dramatically increased. Trends toward increased interdisciplinarity and complexity are recapitulated across many grand challenge problems in computational geoscience, ranging from space weather to modeling subsurface fluid flow.
The feasibility of deploying advanced models to tackle these problems is complicated by two factors: first, the architectural trends of supercomputing systems, which point towards increased levels of parallelism, and second, for such systems to be useful, scientists from many disciplines, distributed across many institutions, will need to share vast amounts of data seamlessly. Realizing this vision of integrated distributed cyberinfrastructure for geoscience research is no simple task. The talk will show the progress made to date, by NCAR and other institutions, to meet these challenges through improvements in application scalability, development of distributed data federation systems, and the creation of national-scale grids for high performance computing such as the TeraGrid.
Finally, to accomplish these ambitious goals, the next generation of scientists and engineers must be inspired, educated and trained. Programs and opportunities at NCAR designed to introduce students to applied mathematics, high performance computing, and computational geoscience will be presented.

HOST:

Ricardo Carretero

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