Location:
Leonard Huxley Building
Mills Rd
Australian National University

Date: Monday April 10 10.30 - 5.00

Many interesting applications in computational science are built around coupled models where separate models for different parts of a system are linked together to model the whole system. These individual parts may describe very different physics or use varying scales of measurement. They exist as stand-alone modelling codes which use different parallel regimes. The high computational complexity of the individual subsystem models is most often conquered through the use of message-passing parallel computing. If the coupling is between multiple distributed-memory applications, a parallel coupling problem arises. Problems that must be addressed include intercomponent data routing issues (i.e., the description, transfer, and transformation of the distribution of the data under exchange), challenges in resource allocation to subsystem models, model scheduling, and numerical uncertainty and stability.

The Computational Tools and Techniques program of APAC (Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing) is planning an informal one day workshop to bring together researchers who use coupled models in their research. The aim is to facilitate an exchange of ideas and experience between researchers from different application areas. The timetable is quite flexible and we welcome suggestions on topics to be covered.

The main speaker for the day will be Dr Jay Larson from ANUSF. Dr Larson has recently joined ANUSF from the Argonne National Laboratory where he has been co-leader on the development of MCT (Model Coupling Toolkit). MCT is a set of software tools for coupling message-passing parallel models and has been incorporated into the latest version of CCSM (the Community Climate System Model). If there is enough interest Dr Larson can give a "hands-on" session on using MCT.

Other speakers include:

• Dr Jason Roberts, University of Tasmania
  The OASIS coupler in the Australian Earth Systems Project.
• Steve Quenette, VPAC
  Scale crossing computational science.
• Jagan Kommineni, Monash University, The GriddLeS project.
  The GriddLeS (Grid Enabling Legacy Software) middleware is a novel software layer that allows previously separate legacy applications to be coupled in a software workflow over the grid without any changes to the application source code. We have previously tested GriddLeS on a number of applications, including a small atmospheric sciences workflow in which weather and climate models are coupled. We have demonstrated a larger atmospheric sciences workflow, that couples multiple global climate models, regional weather models and pollution models in one virtual application.

If you would like to attend this workshop could you please email

Offers of presentations are also welcome and these can be of any length.

There could possibly be some financial support for attendees from the APAC CT&T project.