The US Department of Energy has awarded a three-year, $54 million grant to a 14-member consortium of national laboratories, universities, and other entities to develop climate models for high-performance computers that don’t yet exist. The project is designed to accelerate the development of Earth system models that will improve projections of three specific components of climate change: water-cycle changes, biogeochemical feedbacks, and the collapse of Antarctic ice sheets.
The consortium, called Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) will develop climate software to be run on next-generation supercomputers that are scheduled to be installed at Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratories in 2017. Contracts for development of the machines are due to be awarded within the next few months. Since their computing architectures haven’t been determined, the ACME group will need to develop flexible and adaptable code, says David Bader, the principal investigator and a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) atmospheric...
