Session

DescriptionCoupled Earth System Model (ESM) simulations involve computationally complex models of the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, river runoff, sea ice, and other components which must act as a single coupled system, increasing the complexity exponentially and requiring extreme-scale computational power. Rigorous spatial coupling between components in ESMs involves field transformations, and communication of data across multiresolution grids while preserving key attributes of interest such as global integrals and local features. Additionally, accurate treatment of coupled nonlinearities between components, with appropriate selection of time step size for exchanging field data can determine the overall performance of the solvers. Understanding and controlling the dominant sources of errors in coupled climate systems, in addition to finding the right balance between both the numerics and computational performance remains key to creating reliable and high-performing coupled physics infrastructures for climate models. This balance is critically important as very high-resolution "Storm resolving" Earth System Models are beginning to appear, and are running on thousands of heterogeneous nodes. In this interactive mini-symposium, we bring together computational and climate scientists to present ongoing developments on accurate and scalable earth system couplers for climate simulations, with focused discussions on performance hurdles in pre-exascale and exascale systems.