Computing the Full Earth System at 1km Resolution

We present the first-ever global simulation of the full Earth system at 1.25 km grid spacing, achieving highest time compression with an unseen number of degrees of freedom. Our model captures the flow of energy, water, and carbon through key components of the Earth system: atmosphere, ocean, and land. To achieve this landmark simulation, we harness the power of 8192 GPUs on Alps and 20480 GPUs on JUPITER, two of the world’s largest GH200 superchip installations. We use both the Grace CPUs and Hopper GPUs by carefully balancing Earth’s components in a heterogeneous setup and optimizing acceleration techniques available in ICON’s codebase. We show how separation of concerns can reduce the code complexity by half while increasing performance and portability. Our achieved time compression of 145.7 simulated days per day enables long studies including full interactions in the Earth system and even outperforms earlier atmosphere-only simulations at a similar resolution.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Published
2025-11-12
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3712285.3771789
Citations
2
Primary Topic
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
4.54
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

Computing the Full Earth System at 1km Resolution

Daniel Klocke, Manoel Römmer, René Redler, Helmuth Haak et al.
2 citations
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
4.54
article

Computing the Full Earth System at 1km Resolution

Daniel Klocke, Manoel Römmer, René Redler, Helmuth Haak, Miguel Gila, Lars Hoffmann, Torsten Hoefler, William H. Sawyer, Andreas Herten, Nils Brüggemann, Reiner Schnur, Sabine Grießbach, Alexandru Calotoiu, Björn Stevens, Dmitry Alexeev, Mathis Bode, Cathy Hohenegger, Jan Frederik Engels, Jonathan Coles, Marcin Copik, Claudia Frauen, Luis Kornblueh, Brandon Weber, Hendryk Bockelmann, Yakup Budanaz, Pratyai Mazumder
article en
2 citations

Abstract

We present the first-ever global simulation of the full Earth system at 1.25 km grid spacing, achieving highest time compression with an unseen number of degrees of freedom. Our model captures the flow of energy, water, and carbon through key components of the Earth system: atmosphere, ocean, and land. To achieve this landmark simulation, we harness the power of 8192 GPUs on Alps and 20480 GPUs on JUPITER, two of the world’s largest GH200 superchip installations. We use both the Grace CPUs and Hopper GPUs by carefully balancing Earth’s components in a heterogeneous setup and optimizing acceleration techniques available in ICON’s codebase. We show how separation of concerns can reduce the code complexity by half while increasing performance and portability. Our achieved time compression of 145.7 simulated days per day enables long studies including full interactions in the Earth system and even outperforms earlier atmosphere-only simulations at a similar resolution.

Universität Hamburg (DE), Forschungszentrum Jülich (DE), German Climate Computing Centre (DE), ETH Zurich (CH), Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (DE), CSCS - Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, Swisscom (Switzerland) (CH)
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
4.54
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.