Speaker: Mark R. Petersen, Ph.D.
When: March 11, 2026, at 3:30pm
Where: KH A203
Title: Ocean Modeling in the High Desert
Abstract: Climate research at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) includes the development of ocean, sea-ice, atmosphere, land-vegetation, and land-ice models. The ability to run high-resolution global simulations efficiently on the world’s largest computers is a priority for the DOE. In this talk, I will describe my experiences as a lead developer for the variable-resolution ocean model, the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS-Ocean), which is a component of the DOE’s Energy, Exascale, Earth System Model (E3SM). Model components must be thoroughly validated in numerous settings, from idealized domains to real-world simulations. Output is compared to the historical record of satellite and shipboard observations, and other ocean models. Applications of E3SM include special configurations where model resolution is enhanced in regions of particular interest, like coastal areas, the Arctic, or below Antarctic ice shelves. Mark is now leading a new effort, Omega, which is a new ocean model written in C++. Omega uses the Kokkos performance portability library to run efficiently on both CPUs and GPUs, and so it can scale efficiently on large supercomputers.