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Massively Parallel Global Climate Model for Paleoclimate Applications

Boslough, Mark B.

GENESIS Version 2.0 is a general circulation model developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and is the principal code that is used by paleoclimatologists to model climate at various times throughout Earth's history. The primary result of this LDRD project has been the development of a distributed-memory parallel version of GENESIS, leading to a significant performance enhancement on commodity-based, large-scale computing platforms like the CPlant. The shared-memory directives of the original version were replaced by MPI calls in the new version of GENESIS. This was accomplished by means of parallel decomposition over latitude strip domains. The code achieved a parallel speedup of four times that of the shared-memory parallel version at R15 resolution. T106 resolution runs 20 times faster than the NCAR serial version on 20 nodes of the CPlant. As part of the project, GENESIS was used to model the climatic effects of an orbiting debris ring due to a large planetary impact event.