Overview of the Software Design of the Community Climate System Model

The Community Climate System Model (CCSM) is a computer model for simulating the Earth’s climate. The CCSM is built from four individual component models for the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, and sea ice. The notion of a physical/dynamical component of the climate system translates directly to th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
Main Authors: Drake, John B., Jones, Philip W., Carr, George R.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: SAGE Publications 2005
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1094342005056094
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1094342005056094
Description
Summary:The Community Climate System Model (CCSM) is a computer model for simulating the Earth’s climate. The CCSM is built from four individual component models for the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, and sea ice. The notion of a physical/dynamical component of the climate system translates directly to the software component structure. Software design of the CCSM is focused on the goals of modularity, extensibility, and performance portability. These goals are met at both the component level and within the individual component models. Performance portability is the ability of a code to achieve good performance across a variety of computer architectures while maintaining a single source code. As a community model, the CCSM must run on a variety of machine architectures and must perform well on all these architectures for computationally intensive climate simulations.