Supercomputers in Ocean Modelling

The increasing availability of supercomputers to the ocean modeling community in recent years is opening vast new possibilities for oceanographic research. Many research institutions in Europe and the United States now have access to supercomputers. This access not only changes the way one approaches a problem, but enables one to think of new problems that were previously intractable. Ocean modeling lends itself particularly well to supercomputing because of the structure of the partial differential equations involved and the numerical algorithms one must use to solve them. Ocean models usually “vectorize” very easily and require the storage of a large number of variables at a particular instant, enabling one to take full advantage of the capabilities of a supercompter.