[BANANA] Berkeley Lab - Scientific Computing Seminar - April 24, 2008

[Esmond G. Ng]

Berkeley Lab - Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:  Thursday, April 24, 2008
Time:  1:00pm-2:00pm  
Location:  Building 50A, 5132 Conference Room

Seminar Speaker:
    Ross Heikes
    Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

Title:  Continuing Development of Models Based on Icosahedral Geodesic 
Grids at CSU

Abstract:
The atmospheric modeling group at Colorado State University (CSU) has 
adopted the icosahedral geodesic grid with Vorononi cells for its global 
models. The icosahedral grid eliminates the difficulties present in 
cartesian grids at the poles due to the convergence of meridians in 
spherical coordinates. The icosahedral grid provides approximately 
homogenous resolution and isotropic distributing of grid points over the 
entire sphere.

Our approach to parallelization is based on a decomposition of the 
spherical domain. These pieces of the global domain are called 
subdomains. We will discuss our strategy to efficiently distribute 
subdomains to processes and communication between subdomains in the 
parallel model.

We are preparing a Global Cloud Resolving Model (GCRM) with a resolution 
of about 2 km. The resulting grid will have about 167 million grid 
points in the horizontal with roughly 50 levels in the vertical. We will 
discuss our plans for parallel I/O and archiving of data from this model.

This is joint work with Celal S. Konor and David Randall.

Sponsor of Seminar:  Tony Drummond