hadcm3

Science (the mag, not the concept) sez: Science is driven by data. New technologies... blah... publishers, including Science, have increasingly assumed more responsibility for ensuring that data are archived and available after publication... blah... Science's policy for some time has been that "all data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science" (see www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/)... blah... Science is extending our data access requirement listed above to include computer codes involved in the…
A post about "Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change" by Steve M. Easterbrook and Timbo "Not the Dark Lord" Johns (thanks Eli). For the sake of a pic to make things more interesting, here is one: It is their fig 2, except I've annotated it a bit. Can you tell where? Yes that's right, I added the red bits. I've circled vn4.5, as that was the version I mostly used (a big step up from vn4.0, which was horrible. Anecdote:it was portablised Cray Fortran, which had automatic arrays, but real fortran didn't. So there was an auto-generated C wrapper around each subroutine passed…
Via mt I find too much of our scientific code base lacks solid numerical software engineering foundations. That potential weakness puts the correctness and performance of code at risk when major renovation of the code is required, such as the disruptive effect of multicore nodes, or very large degrees of parallelism on upcoming supercomputers [1] The only code I knew even vaguely well was HadCM3. It wasn't amateurish, though it was written largely by "software amateurs". In the present state of the world, this is inevitable and bad (I'm sure I've said this before). However, the quote above is…