The research community agrees that climate and climate calculations are of great social importance in the future. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the research environments have access to substantial compute resources.
NorESM is an earth system model for simulating climate change. Researchers all over Norway and Europe use this model, which is maintained through the project “Infrastructure for Norwegian Earth System Modeling” (INES). The model is recognised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who has used research based on NorESM simulations in its climate report.
Unlocking Climate Insights
This is how Norwegian climate simulations have contributed to the UN's climate report
The INES researchers have an insatiable appetite for increased computing power. Many of the projects relying on climate simulations would not reach such ambitious levels without access to national resources.
A climate model is complex, and a typical simulation uses thousands of processor cores simultaneously, preferably over several weeks in a row. NorESM has run up to 25,000 cores on Betzy and GPU porting of the code is underway. This makes the application suitable for testing on the new supercomputer LUMI.
Our simulations create large amounts of data that must be stored securely, processed efficiently, found by, and shared with other researchers.
At present, only Sigma2 can offer suitable HPC and storage resources that the national climate research community jointly has access to, says Mats Bentsen, Researcher at NORCE
INES —Infrastructure for Norwegian Earth System Modeling
The goals of INES include maintaining an advanced, verified ESM for national and international use, offering an infrastructure for effective model simulations, storage, analysis, and validation, and ensuring efficient model data sharing through an infrastructure that adheres to international data grids and climate community standards.