Session

DescriptionWeather and climate models contain typically millions of lines of code which were in many cases developed over multiple decades. This makes it difficult to adapt these models to the emerging massively parallel supercomputers while still keeping the code readable, maintainable and ready for operational use. One major concern for many weather and climate prediction centers is the ability for domain scientists to explore new algorithms without the need to first create the infrastructure for those changes. One strategy to address these difficulties is the use of emerging hardware architectures which require relatively small amount of code adaptation while still promising great performance and energy efficiency. Examples for these architectures are ARM processors and NEC vector engines. Exploration of new algorithms can also be facilitated by using directive based approaches. This includes programming models like OpenMP and OpenACC. These programming models have the advantage that the original code base can in principle still be used on traditional architectures like CPUs as well as ARM processors and NEC Aurora Tsubasa vector engines. This mini-symposium discusses these strategies by presenting porting efforts for different major weather models widely used in the weather and climate community.