13TB, 80,000 cores and TECA: The search for extreme events in climate datasets

Modern climate datasets expose parallelism across a number of dimensions: spatial locations, timesteps and ensemble members. We have designed TECA (Toolkit for Extreme Climate Analysis) to exploit these modes of parallelism, thereby enabling climate analysis tasks to be completed orders of magnitude faster than a serial mode of execution. We have applied TECA for detecting tropical cyclones, extra-tropical cyclones, atmospheric rivers and blocking events in climate output. As a leading example, we demonstrate the successful application of TECA for finding tropical cyclones in a massive 13TB CAM5 0.25-degree dataset; we complete the analysis task on 80,000 cores in ~1 hour. We will present scientific results from the application of TECA to multi-resolution CAM5 and CMIP-3/CMIP-5 ensemble output, characterizing the change in extreme events across models and scenarios.