SPF ExCALIBUR: Marine Systems (NEMO) Design

Tender description

The weather & climate system has a number of marine systems. In particular, it includes models of the ocean (NEMO-OCE), sea ice (NEMO-SI3), a system for initialising the ocean state (NEMOVAR), and a biogeochemistry model (MEDUSA). A key aspect of this subset of the marine systems is that they share similar coding standards (for example, see Appendix F of https://forge.ipsl.jussieu.fr/nemo/chrome/site/doc/NEMO/manual/pdf/NEMO_manual.pdf for NEMO’s coding standards). Those coding standards imply a specific form of code structure. Exploratory work with NEMO (the GOcean Technology Proof of Concept and more recent follow on work) has shown that, as a result of this structure, there is good potential to be able to apply the principle of the separation of concerns without having to rewrite the source codes (as needed to be done for the atmospheric model). This would then extend the applicability of the current, CPU focused, code to a much broader range of processor architectures, including GPUs, without having to rewrite the source codes. This activity, which is part of the Weather and Climate Work Package 1, will research whether it is possible to extend this exploratory, proof-of-concept, work to a more complete implementation for NEMO. It will then explore the extension to the other NEMO-like components listed above. Keywords: Research