[ES_JOBS_NET] Postdoctoral position, petascale expansion of superparameterized climate simulation, University of California, Irvine

[Christine Wiedinmyer]

*Postdoctoral position in petascale expansion of superparameterized 
climate simulation for understanding low cloud / climate feedbacks*

Mike Pritchard
Department of Earth System Sciences
University of California, Irvine, CA

I'm looking for a computationally talented postdoc to join an exciting 
new effort to better understand global low-cloud climate feedbacks using 
petascale computers. Low clouds have been a decades-long 
parameterization challenge for global climate models, and low cloud 
feedbacks are a primary source of uncertainty in climate projections for 
the 21st century.

You would join a new team - spanning UCI / UW / Stony Brook & PNNL - 
that has envisioned a way to simulate low clouds globally with minimal 
approximations. Our strategy hinges on re-engineering a multi-scale 
(superparameterized) climate model to take advantage of the huge power 
at the GPU-accelerated petascale on DOE's newest supercomputer systems. 
By exploiting this technology we think it's already possible to make a 
global model that heterogeneously resolves the small (250-m) scale 
turbulent eddies that form boundary-layer clouds and that this would 
lead to more robust simulations of low cloud-climate interaction physics 
than has been possible.

The successful applicant would lead an effort at UCI to add a 
petascale-capable MPI parallel decomposition scaffold to the 
SuperParameterized Community Atmosphere Model v.5 (SPCAM5) so it can 
scale to over fifty thousand processors. Only by running at these scales 
can our project make the extreme computational demands of global low 
cloud physics explicitly tractable over the entire planet. I would help 
closely with the software engineering and design plan. Other 
responsibilities will include optimizing the representation of simulated 
low clouds in the new model against observations and applying it to 
learn about the physics of global low cloud-climate feedbacks and 
aerosol indirect effects on climate change.

As a central part of the team there will be leadership opportunities for 
coordination and scientific interaction with expert collaborators at the 
University of Washington (Chris Bretherton's group), Stony Brook 
University (Marat Khairoutdinov's group) and the Pacific Northwest 
National Lab (PNNL; Minghuai Wang & Balwinder Singh) who are working on 
complementary software engineering activities including graphical 
co-processor acceleration with GPUs and physics algorithm efficiency gains.

The term of appointment is for one year at first but with expected 
renewal for as many as two more pending approval. Start dates are 
flexible and could begin as early as September 2014. Due to the 
computational needs of this project, strong software fluency in 
Fortran90, MPI parallelization, standard UNIX scripting languages and 
experience working in high performance computing environments are 
required. Experience with modern versions of the Community Atmosphere 
Model is desired but not essential. Salary will be commensurate with 
experience and competitiveness.

Please submit electronically: (1) a curriculum vitae, (2) a publication 
list, (3) a brief cover letter (no more than 1 page) describing research 
interests and technical background, and (4) the names of four 
individuals who can provide a letter of reference. Applications received 
prior to August 1, 2014 will be given preference. Applications or 
informal inquiries can be sent directly to me at mspritch at uci.edu 
<mailto:mspritch at uci.edu>.

Thanks!

Mike Pritchard
Assistant Professor
Earth System Sciences
University of California, Irvine
http://www.ess.uci.edu/researchgrp/mspritch
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