Activities
Simulation and Data Laboratory Terrestrial Systems
The SimDataLab TerrSys is primarily involved in supporting research groups of Geoverbund ABC/J. These groups comprise scientists from IBG-3 at Forschungszentrum Jülich and Meteorological Institute in Bonn and Cologne.
Work encompasses the porting, (performance) testing and (standard) setup of the fully coupled TerrSysMP system at high resolutions for different model domains:
- continentally (Europe),
- regionally (North Rhine Westphalia),
- or locally (small and meso-scale river catchments)
TerrSysMP is an Earth System Model where ICON- or COSMO can be used as atmosphere model, CLM for land-surface model, and ParFlow for the subsurface model. The interface model TerrSysMP has a build environment which make compiling and running test case on a specific computing machine a quite easy endeavor. The target machines for large runs are JURECA and JUWELS at the Jülich Supercomputing Center.
The fully coupled system is likewise targeting at highly scalable architectures, especially when also the atmospheric model component is run at convection resolving resolutions of 3 km and less with very short time steps. The external coupler OASIS3-MCT is used in order to ensure a higher modularity, more easy upgrades or replacements of model system components and also to promote a more rapid development cycle with relatively few code adjustments. However this MPMD design feature and its fairly complex distribution of tasks need a lot of scalability testing to determine an optimum run configuration.
When the above configurations are run beyond test cases, validation are process case studies for longer, transient time spans, e.g. in climate change setups, long run times become as well an issue as data handling, processing and storage.
Linked to this are research activities of the SimLab that focus on running the WRF atmospheric model in a climate mode setup in the framework of the
Euro-CORDEX initiative as part of the World Climate Research Programme.
