A highly scalable Met Office NERC Cloud model
This work provides atmospheric scientists with a more scalable and customizable modeling tool for studying atmospheric flows, turbulence, and cloud microphysics, though it is incremental as it builds upon an existing model.
The researchers tackled the scalability limitation of the Met Office Large Eddy Model (LEM), which could not scale beyond 512 cores, by developing the Met Office NERC Cloud model (MONC), a rewrite that achieves significant scalability improvements on high-performance computing machines.
Large Eddy Simulation is a critical modelling tool for scientists investigating atmospheric flows, turbulence and cloud microphysics. Within the UK, the principal LES model used by the atmospheric research community is the Met Office Large Eddy Model (LEM). The LEM was originally developed in the late 1980s using computational techniques and assumptions of the time, which means that the it does not scale beyond 512 cores. In this paper we present the Met Office NERC Cloud model, MONC, which is a re-write of the existing LEM. We discuss the software engineering and architectural decisions made in order to develop a flexible, extensible model which the community can easily customise for their own needs. The scalability of MONC is evaluated, along with numerous additional customisations made to further improve performance at large core counts. The result of this work is a model which delivers to the community significant new scientific modelling capability that takes advantage of the current and future generation HPC machines.