Performance Tuning and Evaluation of a Parallel Community Climate Model

The Parallel Community Climate Model (PCCM) is a message-passing parallelization of version 2.1 of the Community Climate Model (CCM) developed by researchers at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the early to mid 1990s. In preparation for use in the Department of Energy’s Parallel Climate Model (PCM), PCCM has recently been updated with new physics routines from version 3.2 of the CCM, improvements to the parallel implementation, and ports to the SGI/Cray Research T3E and Origin 2000. We describe our experience in porting and tuning PCCM on these new platforms, evaluating the performance of different parallel algorithm options and comparing performance between the T3E and Origin 2000.