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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/F011571/1
Title: Towards Generic Scalability of the Unifed Model
Principal Investigator: Steenman-Clark, Dr L
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
IBM UK Ltd Met Office
Department: Meteorology
Organisation: University of Reading
Scheme: Standard Research
Starts: 01 October 2007 Ends: 31 March 2009 Value (£): 120,701
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
High Performance Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Environment Information Technologies
Related Grants:
EP/F011148/1 EP/F010885/1
Panel History:
Panel DatePanel NameOutcome
16 Apr 2007 HPC Software Development (Science) Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
SummaryThe Met Office's Unified Model (UM) is a computer model of the processes that determine our weather and the Earth's climate. The UM can be set up to simulate weather on a small, regional scale, or a global scale and the level-of-detail (resolution of the model) can be varied to capture more or less information about the physical processes involved.The model can take a very long time to run, even on very large supercomputers. The Met Office themselves buy a new supercomputer, the fastest they can afford, every few years and this lets them keep up with the increasing complexity of the model the scientists wish to explore.The UM is also used by a large number of academic researchers and scientists in Universities. Reading University are the key providers of the UM to the academic community and they work closely with the Met Office to make the model available. Academics typically run the UM on the supercomputers provided by the government as part of a National Service provided to all scientists in the U.K. Much of the time on these computers is used by the many users of the UM, and anything that can be done to make better use of the time on these computers is of benefit to the community as a whole. For example, if the UM can be made to run faster on a supercomputer, more science runs could be done in the time available or the computer could be used to run some code from another scientist.The scientists in the U.K also have several other large computers on which they wish to run the model. These computers are often owned by the University the scientist works at. There are also scientists in other countries that use the UM on their supercomputers. For instance, the UM is run on the Earth Simulator in Japan.Since the UM is used by so many people on so many computers, there are some quite well known problems with the way the code is written that stop it running as fast as it could. For each of these problems, this project aims to change the code so that it will run faster. We hope to make changes to the code that can be tailored to each of the machines on which the UM is run in as simple a way as possible so that the benefits apply to as many scientists as possible. The project will help the Met Office too because they will have a wider choice of machines that they can consider buying in the future.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
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Summary
Date Materialised
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Organisation Website: http://www.rdg.ac.uk