Coupled Marine Ecosystem Modelling on High-Performance Computers

Simulation of the marine environment has become an important tool across a wide range of human activities, with applications in coastal engineering, offshore industries, fisheries management, marine pollution monitoring, weather forecasting and climate research to name but a few. Hydrodynamic models have been under development for many years and have reached a high level of sophistication. However, sustainable management of the ecological resources of coastal environments demands an ability to understand and predict the behaviour of the marine ecosystem. Thus, it is highly desirable to extend the capabilities of existing models to include chemical, bio-geo-chemical and biological processes within the marine ecosystem.

This paper describes the development of a high-resolution threedimensional coupled transport/ecosystem model of the Northwest European continental shelf and explores the particular problems encountered in its implementation on high-performance computer systems. We present preliminary results from the coupled model. We also discuss the performance levels achieved and the parallelization and optimization strategies employed.