Articles | Volume 18, issue 4
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-905-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-905-2025
Development and technical paper
 | 
18 Feb 2025
Development and technical paper |  | 18 Feb 2025

The real challenges for climate and weather modelling on its way to sustained exascale performance: a case study using ICON (v2.6.6)

Panagiotis Adamidis, Erik Pfister, Hendryk Bockelmann, Dominik Zobel, Jens-Olaf Beismann, and Marek Jacob

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Cited articles

Bauer, P., Stevens, B., and Hazeleger, W.: A digital twin of Earth for the green transition, Nat. Clim. Change, 11, 80–83, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-00986-y, 2021. a
Bechtold, P., Köhler, M., Jung, T., Doblas-Reyes, F., Leutbecher, M., Rodwell, M. J., Vitart, F., and Balsamo, G.: Advances in simulating atmospheric variability with the ECMWF model: From synoptic to decadal time-scales, Q. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc., 134, 1337–1351, https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.289, 2008. a
Crueger, T., Giorgetta, M. A., Brokopf, R., Esch, M., Fiedler, S., Hohenegger, C., Kornblueh, L., Mauritsen, T., Nam, C., Naumann, A. K., Peters, K., Rast, S., Roeckner, E., Sakradzija, M., Schmidt, H., Vial, J., Vogel, R., and Stevens, B.: ICON-A, The Atmosphere Component of the ICON Earth System Model: II. Model Evaluation, J. Adv. Model. Earth Sy., 10, 1638–1662, https://doi.org/10.1029/2017MS001233, 2018. a
Doms, G., Förstner, J., Heise, E., Herzog, H.-J., Mironov, D., Raschendorfer, M., Reinhardt, T., Ritter, B., Schrodin, R., Schulz, J.-P., and Vogel, G.: A Description of the Nonhydrostatic Regional COSMO Model. Part II: Physical Parameterization, Consortium for Small-Scale Modelling, http://www.cosmo-model.org (last access: 18 December 2023), 2011. a
Dongarra, J. and Geist, A.: Report on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier System, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tech. Rep. Tech Report No. ICL-UT-22-05, 2022. a
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In this paper, we investigated performance indicators of the climate model ICON (ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic) on different compute architectures to answer the question of how to generate high-resolution climate simulations. Evidently, it is not enough to use more computing units of the conventionally used architectures; higher memory throughput is the most promising approach. More potential can be gained from single-node optimization rather than simply increasing the number of compute nodes.
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