CCSM4 will contain totally new infrastructure capabilities that permit new flexibility and extensibility to address the challenges involved in earth system modeling. An integral part of CCSM4 is the implementation of a coupling architecture that takes a completely new approach with respect to the high-level design of the system.
The CCSM4 coupling infrastructure now provides the ability to use a single code base in a start-to-end development cycle; from model parameterization development that might only require a single processor, to performing ultra high resolution simulations on HPC platforms using tens-of-thousands of cores. The CCSM4 coupling architecture also provides "plug and play" capability of data and active components and includes a user-friendly scripting system and informative timing utilities. Together, these tools enable a user to create a wide variety of "out-of-the-box" experiments for different model configurations and resolutions and also to determine the optimal load balance for those experiments to ensure maximal throughput and efficiency. CCSM4 is also targeting much higher resolutions than any previous CCSM coupled model and efforts have been made to reduce the memory footprint and to improve scaling in all components.
Anticipated computational challenges that earth system modeling will be facing as we move to the next generation of high performance platforms will also be discussed.