On Advanced Scientific Understanding, Model Componentisation and Coupling in GENIE

GENIE is a scalable modular platform aiming to simulate the long term evolution of the Earth’s climate. It’s modularity lies in the fact that it consists of a separate module for the earth’s atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the sea-ice and the land-ice. Such models need to be coupled together to produce the ensemble model. As new modules are actively being researched and developed, it is desirable that the Genie community has the flexibility to add, modify and couple together GENIE modules easily, without undue programming effort. Despite significant progress by the Genie community the desired result has not yet been achieved. This paper discusses a methodology for parametrising Genie, i.e., annotating the coupling semantics and coordinating the coupled model execution in a Grid environment. This is not trivial due to technical constraints such as global variables and large, shared data meshes, as well as semantic dependencies, such as complex interpolations, extrapolations and model-specific execution flows. In order to address these issues, we present the OLOGEN ontology for GENIE. The proposed scheme, consists of a set of semantics for coupled model development and execution; the latter simulated with functional skeletons. Last, OLOGEN supports component coupling and promotes distribution.