Geophysical fluid dynamics education and research

We believe that this work fills an important gap in the STEM education strategy of the nation. Increasingly computational modeling is a key part of any technical endeavor. In the past many innovations have been driven by increasing horsepower of desktop systems. However, in recent years desktop CPU clockspeed increases have flattened and performance boosts today are increasingly reliant on making computers "wider" [33] i.e. introducing multi-thread and process parallelism. This means that desktop computing needs to be supplemented by more powerful compute clusters in many endeavors, in order for practitioners to remain competitive. The work we propose here will expose students at all levels to tools and techniques of modeling on compute clusters. Therefore, not only will students gain access to more sophisticated models for specific educational topics through our work, but students will also gain familiarity with more advanced approaches to computational systems. Today the performance of EC2 type services for parallel computation is limited, but the concepts and strategies for using these systems can still be appreciated. Performance
seems likely to increase in the future -- indeed we were recently contacted by the developers of the open source parallel library OpenMPI with an inquiry about collaborating to improve performance of our current EC2 demonstrations.
As the NSF and other US agencies and commercial entities invest more and more in high-end computing and national network infrastructure, it is vital that we create an adequate pool of students who will be able to take maximal advantage of those resources when they join the workforce. This work will go a long way toward creating a foundation on which to build the necessary educational capability.