Japanese Research Group Performs Largest Ever Meteorological Calculation on Supercomputer Fugaku

Nov. 24, 2020

National Institute for Environmental Studies
RIKEN
Fujitsu Limited
Metro, Inc.
Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo

A Japanese research group consisting of the National Institute for Environmental Studies, RIKEN, Fujitsu Limited, Metro, Inc., and the University of Tokyo has implemented an unprecedented, large-scale coupled calculation of global weather simulation and data assimilation, for a 3.5 km horizontal mesh with 1024 ensembles with the supercomputer “Fugaku”, which is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. The scale of the calculations performed in this study is approximately 500 times larger than daily ensemble-based data assimilation for weather forecasts performed by meteorological organizations throughout the world. This result demonstrates the high overall performance of Fugaku and showed that the collaborative development of the latest supercomputer, simulation models, and data assimilation systems can realize a much larger scale weather forecasting system. This result also offers the potential to significantly improve the accuracy of future weather forecasts and climate change predictions.

The research group presented the results of this research at SC20 (held online from November 9 to 19, 2020), an international conference on supercomputers, and was recognized as a finalist for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in computational science. The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is jointly sponsored by the ACM, an international academic society in computer science, and the IEEE Computer Society. This award recognizes studies with the most remarkable achievement throughout the year in the innovation of applying high-performance parallel computing to the field of science and technology.

https://www.nies.go.jp/whatsnew/20201120/20201120-e.html
(National Institute for Environmental Studies)