Table of Contents

Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Participating Agencies and Executive Offices

Ad hoc Working Group on Climate Modeling

Foreword

Executive Summary

1. Background

2. Summary of Findings

3. Summary of recommen- dations

4. Final Comments

Charge to the Working Group 

Main Report

1. Purpose

2. Current Situation

3. Scope of Document / Underlying Definitions and Assumptions

4. Elements of Climate Science

5. Issues of Computational Systems

6. Human resources

7. Management / Business Practices / Institutional models

8. Recommen- dations

9. Reference Documents

10. Endnotes

Full Report (PDF)

o The requirements and expectations placed on the climate community have grown to the point that the U.S. requires the service of a dedicated organization, which is referred to here as the Climate Service.

o The Climate Service must operate as a product-driven research organization. This is in contrast to the discovery-driven research that is predominant in U.S. science programs.

o A successful product-driven Climate Service requires leadership, management, and business practices that are substantially different from those used in discovery-driven research activities. The following attributes are required:

• Clear definition of mission.
• Executive management with the responsibility of overseeing quality control and delivering the climate products.
• Unifying incentive structure that connects individual's activities with organizational goals.
• Supporting business practices.

o There are three fundamental issues that provide complex and conflicting challenges to the formation of a Climate Service.

• The high-performance computing industry has fundamentally changed. While this has provided better computational resources to many individual researchers, those applications that require the highest level of computing are struggling to remain viable. The tension is heightened by U.S. policy on supercomputers.
• There are not enough people to provide either the scientific or information technology expertise needed to sustain all of the U.S. climate-science activities that strive to provide comprehensive capabilities. Key positions are going unfilled and students are not being trained to fill either the scientific research positions or the esoteric niches of software engineering, computational science, and computer science required for a successful high-end climate capability.
• The multi-agency culture that developed to support the discovery-driven research activities is not well suited to support a more product-oriented climate service. A multitude of sub-critical activities reside in the different agencies, and there is no straightforward mechanism to allow concerted concentration of these resources towards common product-oriented goals.

o The Climate Service must be cognizant of and responsive to foreign centers that are defining the state-of-the-art in assessment and simulation capabilities and, increasingly, in scientific research.

o Issues related to high performance computing:

• Shared-memory, vector computers manufactured in Japan, and essentially unavailable to U.S. researchers, have a combination of usability and performance that gives them far more capability than computers available to U.S. scientists.
• Parallel computers manufactured in the U.S., often with distributed memory, are difficult to use. In addition, there are intrinsic limitations to the ability of climate-science algorithms to achieve high levels of performance on these computers.
• Japanese-manufactured computers already delivered to foreign centers assure that U.S. scientists will have significantly less computational capability for at least three to five years
  • With the delivery of the next generation of Japanese computers, and continuation of current approaches to computing in the U.S., the gap between the U.S. and foreign centers will increase and exist for longer than five years.
  • The purchase of Japanese vector computers would have an immediate impact on climate and weather science in the U.S. and offers the only short-term strategy for closing the computational gap between U.S. and foreign centers.
•  There is insufficient investment in the U.S. in software. A software infrastructure must be built to support both climate and weather activities. The software infrastructure must:
  • Facilitate the interactions of scientists at different institutions, allowing concurrent development in a controlled environment.
  • Facilitate the interactions of climate scientists and computational scientists, allowing more robust use of computational platforms.
  • Include development of systems software necessary for the operation of the hardware platform.
• The U.S. policy requiring the use of distributed memory, commodity-based processor parallel computers increases the size of the needed software investment.
  • Japanese vector computers require substantially less expenditure on software.
  • The risk is high that software developed for U.S.-available computers will not achieve the performance and reliability realized by that using Japanese-manufactured vector computers.
• Without the development of successful software, the deployment of large U.S.-manufactured hardware systems to increase computational capability is not justified.
• The development of U.S. computational platforms for the Climate Service is a research activity and the research must be driven by the climate applications rather than by technological development. As a research activity, the intrinsic risks are high.

o Issues related to the shortage of human resources:

• In order to focus adequate climate-science expertise for the Climate Service, a multi-agency response is needed.
• Timely development of a Climate Service requires participation of presently existing capabilities.
• Integration of efforts across institutions and disciplines is needed to achieve critical concentration of expertise on priority problems.
• Competition for human resources with the mainstream information technology industry is high, and it will be impossible to populate the information technology staffs of multiple comprehensive climate-research centers.

o Issues related to existing multi-agency culture:

• The current management and review process rewards individual accomplishments and tends to fragment efforts rather than focus them towards common goals.
• The reward and incentive structure that currently exists is not strong enough to allow coordinated, product-oriented goals to rise to a level to be competitive with internal Agency missions and programs.
• Fundamentally new management and business strategies are needed to support the product-driven Climate Service.
• The difficulties of facing these management issues are large and suggest that the initial implementation of the Climate Service should be as simple as possible.
  • This is in conflict with need to integrate activities across institutions and disciplines to address human resource issues, to maintain similar levels of comprehensiveness as foreign centers, and to keep up with scientific evolution.
• The management issues require more directed authority and decision making than is possible within umbrella organizations, like the USGCRP, which were designed to guide research rather than generate products.
• Without addressing these management issues, providing additional funds to the existing programs will not be effective in the development of the Climate Service.