Session

DescriptionEarth System models simulate the complex interactions of the atmosphere, oceans, land and sea ice, providing valuable insights into short-term weather forecasts and long-term climate research, which are important for understanding and mitigating the impacts of weather-related disasters and climate change. As the complexity and computational demands of these models increase, the need for Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration becomes increasingly apparent. GPUs are computational architectures that efficiently support massive parallelism. Whilst several studies have shown promising computational performance by porting GPUs to Earth System models and thus enabling higher-resolution simulations, some of them have also discussed the challenges of adapting existing codes to run on GPUs. To address refactoring and portability issues, automating code refactoring tools have been developed to increase the efficiency of porting code to GPU and improve portability and maintainability. This minisymposium aims to bring together scientists, computational researchers, and model developers to explore the role of GPU acceleration in optimizing Earth System models, share the experience, and look to the future. Topics also include optimization strategies (e.g., parallelization techniques, memory management, data transfer, etc.), automating code refactoring tools (e.g., PSyclone), benefits and challenges (e.g., speedup, memory constraints, code management, etc.).