Geoscience Application Requirements for Petascale Architectures II (GARPA-2) Workshop
The GARPA-2 workshop was held at San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) on February 21-22, 2007. In August 2007, the NSF funding for this workshop series was extended into FY2008. During the GARPA-2 workshop, participants identified a broad set of geoscience application areas as being suitable to go to the petascale, as well as having profound science impact. One of these was climate simulation. In FY2008, the GARPA workshops engendered collaborations in this area that have borne fruit.
In particular, a collaboration between NCAR, SDSC, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory resulted in a Gordon Bell finalist paper at SuperComputing 2007, entitled "WRF Nature Run." This research used up to 15,360 processors of the New York Blue IBM BG/L machine at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, and it achieved 3.4 TFLOPS sustained. Further, a high-resolution coupled climate modeling collaboration emerged from GARPA-2 that included NCAR, the Center for Ocean, Land, Atmosphere Studies (COLA), the University of Miami, and the University of California, Berkeley. This collaboration began the development of an interactive ensemble (IE) version of CCSM based on CCSM coupler 7, as well as Grand Challenge simulations using 0.5-degree atmospheric and land models coupled to 10-km ocean and sea-ice components. In 2009, the funding left at NCSA for GARPA will be spent to support understanding the challenges faced by petascale geoscience applications that are candidates to use the NSF Track-1 system at the University of Illinois in 2011.