OASIS4 – a coupling software for next generation earth system modelling

• Published in: Geoscientific Model Development Vol. 3; no. 1; pp. 87 - 104
• Main Authors: Redler, R., Valcke, S., Ritzdorf, H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Katlenburg-Lindau Copernicus GmbH 01-01-2010; Copernicus Publications
• ISSN: 1991-9603; 1991-962X; 1991-959X; 1991-9603; 1991-962X
• DOI: 10.5194/gmd-3-87-2010

In this article we present a new version of the Ocean Atmosphere Sea Ice Soil coupling software (OASIS4). With this new fully parallel OASIS4 coupler we target the needs of Earth system modelling in its full complexity. The primary focus of this article is to describe the design of the OASIS4 software and how the coupling software drives the whole coupled model system ensuring the synchronization of the different component models. The application programmer interface (API) manages the coupling exchanges between arbitrary climate component models, as well as the input and output from and to files of each individual component. The OASIS4 Transformer instance performs the parallel interpolation and transfer of the coupling data between source and target model components. As a new core technology for the software, the fully parallel search algorithm of OASIS4 is described in detail. First benchmark results are discussed with simple test configurations to demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the software when applied to Earth system model components. Typically the compute time needed to perform the search is in the order of a few seconds and is only weakly dependant on the grid size.