High-performance computing for climate change impact studies with the Pasture Simulation model
Résumé
High-performance computing technology permits to efficiently achieve high-performance throughputs for intensive CPU load applications. We describe the development of an integrated tool for climate change impact studies on grassland ecosystems running with pixel-wise data. The pixel-based Pasture Simulation model (PaSim) is suited to work with a NetCDF format of input and output files. It includes the parallel job launcher, which dispatches individual jobs to execute simulations. In a case study covering metropolitan France, we demonstrate how this approach is configured and used to evaluate the impact of climate change on grassland productivity. Over 10,000 pixels of 8 8 km resolution, we report 25 h to complete the simulation on a cluster machine (TITANE) with 200 processors, which is a speedup of 200.