A Real-Time North American Forecast at 10-km Resolution with the Canadian MC2 Meso-LAM

Abstract The next generation of high-performance computers will be based on clusters of shared-memory symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) nodes interconnected by a low-latency, high-bandwidth network. In this paper, the parallel performance of the nonhydrostatic Mesoscale Compressible Community (MC2) limited-area atmospheric model on clusters of NEC SX-4 symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) nodes is presented. Several hybrid parallel-programming approaches are now possible with the SMP cluster SC-MC2 implementation based on internode MPI message-passing and intranode shared-memory tasking or threads. At total sustained execution rates of between 25 and 30 Gflop s−1 on single-node or multinode clusters, it is now possible for the first time ever to generate a 24–48-h real-time weather forecast over North America at 10-km resolution.