High Performance Computing and Modeling in Climate Change Science

Abstract

High-end modeling of the climate system plays a key role in understanding the causes and effects of global warming. In his talk, Dr. Drake will discuss the models used for simulating possible futures and the contributions of high performance computing to such efforts as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The mathematical viewpoint, and some of the problems associated with ongoing development of earth system models, presents a challenge for the next generation of climate modelers. To understand the coupling of biogeochemical as well as physical processes, they must correctly identify and quantify the feedbacks in the climate system.

Many of the key economic and societal decisions that will be made in the next decade depend on our ability to improve the predictive accuracy of forecasts for decades and even centuries into the future. The modeling community is now launching several efforts to build more comprehensive earth system models and Dr. Drake will present recent results from these projects. Specifically, he will discuss the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), and its extensions and applications to climate change, including work done in conjunction with Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and NASA collaborators.

Dr. John Drake received his Ph.D in Mathematics from the University of Tennessee in 1991. He joined the mathematics group in the Computer Sciences and Mathematics Division at ORNL in 1984. He is an expert in the numerical simulation of fluid flows. His technical work encompasses fast algorithms for spectral evaluation and general formulations of the semi-Lagrangian transport method for fluids problems relevant to climate modeling. Dr. Drake has worked extensively with the ORNL Center for Computational Sciences as a user of the Intel Hypercube, the Intel Paragon XPS150, the IBM Power4, and the Cray X1E and XT3/4. He has also acted as an advisor on a number of boards and panels for the development of production parallel computing environments and high end computing.

In addition, Dr. Drake is an author on more than 60 professional papers and 30 technical reports, and guest editor of special issues of Parallel Computing and the International Journal of High Performance Computing and Applications. Currently, he is a principal investigator (with Phil Jones of Los Alamos National Laboratory) on a DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing project, in which a consortium of DOE and NASA laboratories is cooperating with the National Center for Atmospheric Research on the development, optimization, and validation of the CCSM.