The computational and energy cost of simulation and storage for climate science: lessons from CMIP6

Acosta, Mario C.; Palomas, Sergi; Paronuzzi Ticco, Stella V.; André, Jean-Claude; Biercamp, Joachim; Bretonniere, Pierre-Antoine; Budich, Reinhard; Castrillo, Miguel; Caubel, Arnaud; Doblas-Reyes, Francisco; Epicoco, Italo; Fladrich, Uwe; Kumar Gupta, Alok; Lawrence, Bryan; Le Sager, Philippe; Lister, Grenville; Moine, Marie-Pierre; Rioual, Jean-Christophe; Sylvie, Joussaume; Valcke, Sophie; Zadeh, Niki; Balaji, Venkatramani

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-188

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https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-188

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Submitted as: methods for assessment of models

23 Oct 2023

Submitted as: methods for assessment of models |

| 23 Oct 2023

Status: this preprint is currently under review for the journal GMD.

The computational and energy cost of simulation and storage for climate science: lessons from CMIP6

Mario C. Acosta, Sergi Palomas, Stella V. Paronuzzi Ticco, Jean-Claude André, Joachim Biercamp, Pierre-Antoine Bretonniere, Reinhard Budich, Miguel Castrillo, Arnaud Caubel, Francisco Doblas-Reyes, Italo Epicoco, Uwe Fladrich, Alok Kumar Gupta, Bryan Lawrence, Philippe Le Sager, Grenville Lister, Marie-Pierre Moine, Jean-Christophe Rioual, Joussaume Sylvie, Sophie Valcke, Niki Zadeh, and Venkatramani Balaji

Abstract. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is one of the biggest international efforts to better understand past, present and future climate changes in a multi-model context. A total of 21 Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) were endorsed in its 6th phase (CMIP6), which included 190 different experiments that were used to simulate 40000 years and produced around 40 PB of data in total. This paper shows the main results obtained from the collection of performance metrics done for CMIP6 (CPMIP). The document provides the list of partners involved, the CPMIP metrics per institution/model, and the approach used for the collection and the coordination behind this process. Furthermore, a section has been included to analyze the results and prove the usefulness of the metrics for the community. Moreover, we describe the main difficulties faced during the collection and propose recommendations for future exercises.

How to cite. Acosta, M. C., Palomas, S., Paronuzzi Ticco, S. V., André, J.-C., Biercamp, J., Bretonniere, P.-A., Budich, R., Castrillo, M., Caubel, A., Doblas-Reyes, F., Epicoco, I., Fladrich, U., Kumar Gupta, A., Lawrence, B., Le Sager, P., Lister, G., Moine, M.-P., Rioual, J.-C., Sylvie, J., Valcke, S., Zadeh, N., and Balaji, V.: The computational and energy cost of simulation and storage for climate science: lessons from CMIP6, Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-188, in review, 2023.

Received: 06 Oct 2023 – Discussion started: 23 Oct 2023

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Mario C. Acosta et al.

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RC1: 'Comment on gmd-2023-188', Anonymous Referee #1, 17 Nov 2023 reply

Nov. 14, 2023
Review for Geoscientific Model Development
“The computational and energy cost of simulation and storage for climate science: lessons from CMIP6”
By Acosta et al.
Recommend: accept subject to revision
This is an interesting and perhaps unique accounting of a subset of the models that participated in CMIP6 with regards to model characteristics related to computing and carbon footprint details. My major comment is that the authors need to be clear that the models described in the paper are, in fact, a subset of the total number of models that participated in CMIP6. This subset is apparently the group of models that participated in the IS-ENES3 project. This needs to be made clear in the abstract and elsewhere.
Detailed comments:
List of authors: One of the coauthor’s names is in the wrong order and misspelled: “Joussame Sylvie” should be “Sylvie Joussaume”
Line 4: Here is an example of where the authors need to clarify the scope of the paper. I’d suggest the wording be changed to,
“This paper shows the main results obtained from the collection of performance metrics from 30 models that participated in the IS-ENES3 and represent a subset of the total of 124 CMIP6 models. The document provides…”
HOWEVER, it’s unclear exactly how many models are actually involved. I got the number 30 from line 42, but there are 32 models listed in Table 2, and 33 listed in Table 3.
Line 41-42: Once again, the authors need to be clear how their models relate to the larger CMIP6 set of models. I recommend the following wording: “In this paper, we present in Sec. 2 the collection of CPMIP metrics from the 30 [or 32, or 33] models that participated in the IS-NES3 project (Joussaume, 2010), out of the total of 124 CMIP6 models, and were used to simulate almost 500,000 years…”
Table 2 caption: Pursuant to the comments above, the authors need to be clear how the models they list in this table relate to the total number of CMIP6 models. This would avoid a scientist reading this paper and looking at this table and not seeing their model and wondering why they aren’t in the table. I’d recommend the following wording: “List of institutions and the models that provided metrics from their CMIP6 models to IS-NES3, which represents a subset of the total of 124 models in CMIP6. Also listed are HPC platform, and resolution used for the ATM and OCN components.” Now, proceed to comment below for a suggestion on the rest of the caption.
Table 2: In Table 1 the authors define “resol” as number of gridpoints, a singularly unhelpful metric when comparing models. Fortunately, here in Table 2 they relate that metric to the more conventional lat-lon resolution. However, I think in the table caption they should note something like, “Note “resol” in Table 1 is number of gridpoints. Here we define “ATM resol” as the horizonal resolution of the atmospheric model component in degrees of latitude and longitude, and “OCN resol” as the horizontal resolution of the ocean model component in degrees of latitude and longitude”.
Line 97: Following the comment above, please add clarification here, something like, “…the categorization of low, medium and high resolutions in terms of latitude-longitude grid spacing. Thus, for the grouping…”
Line 99: And again here, I recommend clarifying the wording as follows: “…as low resolution with roughly 1 degree latitude-longitude grid spacing and up to …”
Line 115: Please define “complexity”. Does this mean number of components (e.g. atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, land ice, biogeochemistry, ocean ecosystem, cloud-aerosol interaction, etc.), number of parameterizations per component, or what? This needs to be defined up front in order to make sense of the subsequent discussion.

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Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-188-RC1

Mario C. Acosta et al.

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Short summary

We present a collection of performance metrics gathered during the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), a worlwide initiative to study the climate change. We analyze the metrics, which resulted from collaboration efforts among many partners and models, and describe our findigs to demonstrate the utility of our study for the scientific community. The research contributes to understand climate modelling performance on the current High-performance Computing (HPC) architectures.


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