The Super Simulation Support and Management System (SSSMS) is a fundamental supporting component in EarthLab. It provides support for program development, debugging and performance tuning, as well as user-oriented model testing, evaluation and adjustment. The SSSMS is designed to be a flexible and efficient platform that fully supports the research activities of EarthLab, including system modeling, development, debugging, results verification, version release, and applications. This system is expected to play a key role in developing products that include both model results and observation data, with efficient use of computing resources.
The SSSMS is built based on an independently developed general coupler known as C-Coupler and, as an interactive integrated coupling platform, it takes advantage of domestic and foreign advanced coupler technology, diagnostic assessment and uncertainty analysis methods. By applying modern software engineering technologies, the system integrates coupling, diagnosis and analysis, with the aim to address the difficulties encountered during the development of earth system models in China with respect to parallelization, standardization, coupler technology and big data analysis.
The SSSMS mainly consists of three sub-systems, from bottom to top, including a computational package subsystem (CPS), model resource subsystem (MRS) and modeling service subsystem (MSS).
The CPS provides researchers with an automatic parallel, fully functional operator library to help develop simulation programs easily and efficiently through hiding complicated low-level parallel technical details. This subsystem also provides a high-performance asynchronous parallel I/O library to deal with the huge amounts of data produced by EarthLab. Through overlapping of the computational time and I/O time, the library is expected to significantly accelerate the simulation process of this high-definition EarthLab.
Operator Library
The MRS implements the standardized encapsulation of various parameterization schemes in EarthLab. It provides a unified development, verification and optimization platform for the parameterization schemes. This subsystem also builds a universal coupler, providing a flexible coupling framework.
The MSS establishes an uncertainty analysis platform. It provides sensitivity analysis, scheme optimization, and quantitative uncertainty analysis for EarthLab by using big data analysis and uncertainty traceability theory. This subsystem helps developers to understand the behavior and structure of EarthLab, ultimately leading to improvements in its simulation performance.
