A GPU-based ocean dynamical core for routine mesoscale-resolving climate simulations

We describe an ocean hydrostatic dynamical core implemented in Oceananigans optimized for Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) architectures. On 64 A100 GPUs, equivalent to 16 computational nodes in current state-of-the-art supercomputers, our dynamical core can simulate a decade of global ocean dynamics per wall-clock day at an 8-kilometer horizontal resolution; a resolution adequate to resolve the ocean’s mesoscale eddy field. Such efficiency, achieved with relatively modest hardware resources, suggests that climate simulations on GPUs can incorporate fully eddy-resolving ocean models. This removes a major source of systematic bias in current IPCC coupled model projections, the parameterization of ocean eddies, and represents a major advance in climate modeling. We discuss the computational strategies, focusing on GPU-specific optimization, and numerical implementation details that enable such high performance.