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
Main Authors: John B. Drake, Philip W. Jones, George R. Carr
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2005
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.77.6157
http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~bbd/pubs/IJHPCADrake2005.pdf
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.