The Design, Implementation, and Performance of a Parallel Ocean Circulation Model

• Main Authors: Aaron Sawdey, Matthew O'Keefe, Rainer Bleck, Robert W. Numrich
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1994
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.51.7622; http://www-mount.ee.umn.edu/~okeefe/papers/sawdey/ecmwf.94.ps

We describe new parallelization techniques applied to a highly parallel ocean circulation application code -- the Miami Isopycnic Ocean Coordinate Model or MICOM. We compare three parallel architectures executing MICOM: vector, massively parallel, and a multiprocessor workstation. Results from a high resolution 0.08 ffi MICOM North Atlantic basin calculation on the Cray T3D are described briefly. This high-resolution calculation gives qualitatively different results than lower resolution runs implying that a resolution threshold must be crossed to retain fidelity to observed ocean currents. We show that it is possible to maintain a single version of the original source code, written in an imperative language (Fortran), which is easily and nearly optimally mapped to both shared and distributed memory machines. These results show that parallel hardware and software have begun to mature so that modelers who can exploit these systems will enjoy significant performance advantages over t.