Computational Design and Performance of the Fast Ocean Atmosphere Model, Version One

The Fast Ocean Atmosphere Model (FOAM) is a climate system model intended for application to climate science questions that require long simulations. FOAM is a distributed-memory parallel climate model consisting of parallel general circulation models of the atmosphere and ocean with complete physics paramaterizations as well as sea-ice, land surface, and river transport models. FOAM’s coupling strategy was chosen for high throughput (simulated years per day). A new coupler was written for FOAM and some modifications were required of the component models. Performance data for FOAM on the IBM SP3 and SGI Origin2000 demonstrates that it can simulate over thirty years per day on modest numbers of processors.