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<div><b>Postdoctoral position in petascale expansion of
superparameterized climate simulation for understanding low
cloud / climate feedbacks</b></div>
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<div>Mike Pritchard</div>
<div>Department of Earth System Sciences</div>
<div>University of California, Irvine, CA</div>
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<div>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. </div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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. </div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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 <a href="mailto:mspritch@uci.edu">mspritch@uci.edu</a>. </div>
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<div>Thanks!</div>
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<div apple-content-edited="true">
Mike Pritchard<br>
Assistant Professor<br>
Earth System Sciences<br>
University of California, Irvine<br>
<a href="http://www.ess.uci.edu/researchgrp/mspritch">http://www.ess.uci.edu/researchgrp/mspritch</a><br>
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