CLIMA | mysite

Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA)

Welcome to the CLIMA-atmosphere page. Let us describe CLIMA-atmosphere.

CLIMA and CliMA

CliMA is the Climate Modeling Alliance formed by Caltech, MIT, NPS, and NASA-JPL. CLIMA is the Climate Machine, the name of the model. The official project website can be found here. CliMA is one of 6 projects funded under an umbrella of projects related to Artificial Intelligence - information on the collection of projects can be found here.

CLIMA in the News

The Data-Driven Earth Systems Model that CLIMA-atmosphere is part of, was highlighted in a July 2018 Science article. The article can be found here; in that article, the system is referred to as the Earth Machine. A separate article published on the NPS website in March 2019 can be found here. Our choice of using the Julia programming language for our project was mentioned in an August 2019 Nature article found here.

CLIMA on GitHub

CLIMA is an open source and open development project. The development of CLIMA can be followed via GitHub here: https://github.com/CliMA/ClimateMachine.jl

What is CLIMA-atmos

CLIMA-atmos is part of the larger Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) led by CalTech with collaborators from NPS, MIT, and JPL. CLIMA-atmos is a new model based on the high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for solving the compressible Navier-Stokes equations specifically for nonhydrostatic atmospheric modeling. CLIMA-atmos solves both the global equations (on the entire planet) as well as in limited-area domains for use in Large-Eddy Simulations (LES). CLIMA-atmos uses tensor-product basis functions (nodal representations only). Therefore, only quadrilaterals and hexahedra are supported.

What can CLIMA-atmos be used for

In the CLIMA project, we will construct a new scalable atmospheric model that will run effectively on modern computer platforms including accelerators. Because the project is open source, we expect that the compute kernels designed for CLIMA-atmos, in particular, can be leveraged to build solvers for other types of systems of partial differential equations.

Available Positions in the CLIMA-atmos group

There are positions available across all the partner institutions. We expect to fill positions for software engineers and postdoctoral students. Please contact me if you are interested in a position.

Who built CLIMA-atmos

CLIMA-atmos was designed and constructed by the Scientific Computing group in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Naval Postgraduate School. This includes Profs. Frank Giraldo, Jeremy Kozdon, and Lucas Wilcox (pictured above) and Maciej Waruszewski (NRC postdoc).

Who funded CLIMA

CLIMA is funded by private donors and the National Science Foundation.

What language is CLIMA-atmos written in

CLIMA-atmos is written in Julia 1.0 using MPI and CUDA.

Which external libraries does CLIMA-atmos require

Currently, CLIMA-atmos requires Open MPI, in addition to Julia.

CLIMA-atmos Grids

CLIMA-atmos uses grids comprised of quadrilaterals (in 2D) and hexahedra (in 3D). CLIMA-atmos is able to use different polynomial orders in each spatial direction.

CLIMA-atmos HPC Performance

CLIMA-atmos is designed specifically to perform well on GPUs. CLIMA-atmos currently uses CUDANative for running on GPUs within Julia and MPI for off-node parallelism.