Coupling Numerical Models of the Atmosphere and Ocean Using the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) Package.
Norman H. Barth, Sharon L. Smith · PPSC · 1993
Coupling numerical models of the atmosphere and ocean is considered from a distributed programming perspective. This involves dividing the coupled model into several programs that include the original individual atmosphere and ocean models, together with a third program we call the {open_quotes}coupler{close_quotes}. These programs interact through message passing and may be run concurrently, on individual (possibly remote machines), that are connected by a network. There are several benefits to this approach: implementation of the coupled model is significantly simplified and requires very few changes to the original atmosphere or ocean model source code; the coupler program itself is essentially model independent, and replacing one of the models (either atmosphere or ocean) for another can be done transparently. Using Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) as an environment the approach has been used successfully to couple two high resolution atmosphere and ocean codes on a Cray 2.