Scaling Coupled Climate Models to Exascale: OpenACC-enabled ECEarth3 Earth System Model

Climate change due to increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases and land surface change is currently one of
the most relevant environmental concerns. It threatens ecosystems and human societies. However, its impact on
the economy and our living standards depends largely on our ability to anticipate its effects and take appropriate
action. Earth System Models (ESMs), such as EC-Earth, can be used to provide society with information on the
future climate. EC-Earth3 generates reliable predictions and projections of global climate change, which are a
prerequisite to support the development of national adaptation and mitigation strategies.
This project investigates methods to enhance the parallel capabilities of EC-Earth3 by offloading bottleneck
routines to GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. To gain a full understanding of climate change at a regional
scale will require EC-Earth3 to be run at a much higher spatial resolution (T3999 ~5km) than is currently
feasible. It is envisaged that the work outlined in this project will provide climate scientists with valuable data
for simulations planned for future exascale systems.