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Parallel processing of atmospheric chemistry calculations: Preliminary considerations
Global climate calculations are already saturating the class modern vector supercomputers with only a few central processing units. Increased resolution and inclusion of routines to deal with biogeochemical portions of the terrestrial climate system will soon demand massively parallel approaches. The atmospheric photochemistry ensemble is intimately linked to climate through the trace greenhouse gases ozone and methane and modules for representing it are being attached to global three dimensional transport and GCM frameworks. Atmospheric kinetics involve dozens of highly interactive tracers and so will accentuate the need for parallel processing of earth system simulations. In the present text we lay some of the groundwork for addition of atmospheric kinetics packages to GCM and global scale atmospheric models on multiply parallel computers. The discussion is tailored for consumption by the photochemical modelling community. After a review of numerical atmospheric chemistry methods, we examine how kinetics can be implemented on a parallel computer. We concentrate especially on data layout and flexibility and how these can be implemented in various programming models. We conclude that chemistry can be implemented rather easily within existing frameworks of several parallel atmospheric models. However, memory limitations may preclude high resolution studies of global chemistry