PNNL

Abstract

In 2011, the US Department of Energy (DOE) developed a report summarizing observed long-term trends that, if continued in the future decades, would have major impacts on the energy sector (DOE, 2013). Among these were regional trends in air and water temperatures, water availability, storms and heavy precipitation, coastal flooding and sea-level rise. The ability to simulate and predict significant, long-term changes in these environmental variables important to energy-sector decisions required capabilities beyond the existing state-of-the-science Earth system models running on the most powerful petascale computers at the time. Concurrently, DOE developed the Exascale Initiative, "a major computer and computational science initiative anchored in (DOE's) mission challenges.... to capture the successful transition to the next era of computing in the 2020 timeframe," while noting that "due to projected technology constraints, current approaches to high performance computing (HPC) software and hardware design will not be sufficient to produce the required exascale capabilities."