Guerin wins grant to enhance atmospheric simulation speed
Roch Guerin and collaborators received an NSF grant to improve speed of GEOS-Chem 3D atmospheric simulation software
Roch Guerin, the Harold B. & Adelaide G. Welge Professor of Computer Science and chair of computer science & engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, leads a team working to improve the speed of GEOS-Chem, a 3D atmospheric simulation software designed to study climate change. With a two-year, $207,394 grant from the National Science Foundation, Guerin and his collaborators seek to enhance the ability of GEOS-Chem to rapidly simulate how Earth’s atmosphere responds to changes in its chemical composition.
The project brings together expertise in computer and atmospheric science and includes McKelvey Engineering faculty Kunal Agrawal, professor of computer science & engineering, and Randall Martin, the Raymond R. Tucker Distinguished Professor in energy, environmental & chemical engineering and model scientist of the GEOS-Chem project.
The interdisciplinary work is motivated by the increased availability of large-scale distributed computing resources, such as those offered by the cloud, and seeks to optimize the distribution of simulation tasks across processors for maximum speed, considering factors like variable computational costs and information exchange between model segments. By improving the speed at which those simulations can run, the project aims to improve researchers’ ability to simulate and understand how Earth's atmosphere evolves, contributing to climate change research and mitigation with potential economic and societal impacts.
