Announcement

An Introduction to the PArallelized LES Model PALM

Seminar to be held at the ENERCON office in Bremen, Germany, 9am to 5pm, 4th - 8th August 2014

PALM is a parallelized large-eddy simulation model, which has been continuously developed at the department of meteorology and climatology, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany, since 1997. It is used to study micro- and mesoscale turbulent boundary layer flows in the atmosphere and ocean by different groups of researchers all over the world. Compared with many other LES models, PALM includes a number of advanced features like topography, non-cyclic horizontal boundary conditions, an embedded Lagrangian particle model, or an interface for adding user defined code. The ocean option of PALM includes salinity and the equation of state for seawater. A coupling between PALM-atmosphere and PALM-ocean has recently been developed. Data output is in netCDF format. PALM is optimized for high performance on all kind of state-of-the-art processor architectures and scales up to several thousands of processors. It is free software and can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License (v3). Download information and a detailed online documentation are available under http://palm.muk.uni-hannover.de.

Seminar contents
The one week seminar gives an overview of PALM, explains the installation procedure, and demonstrates how to carry out runs, either on Linux notebooks provided by the participants or on local PCs provided by CUHK. The seminar starts with a general introduction to large eddy simulation, followed by a discussion of the basic set of equations that are used in PALM, and the numerical methods that are implemented. After explaining the PALM installation procedure, the main focus is given on how to set up PALM simulations and how to run them using the ksh/bash-shell scripts that are provided with PALM. Further attention is also given to questions like how to extend PALM by user-defined code and how to debug the code. Setups for several standard applications will be explained in detail (e.g. convection, flow around buildings, etc.). Beside the theoretical lessons given in the morning, there will also be hands-on sessions in the afternoon, where participants carry out exercises under the guidance of the lecturers.

Requirements
Participants should have a solid background in CFD modelling, FORTRAN90/95, MPI, and Linux/Unix. If participants intend to use their own Linux notebooks for running PALM during the seminar, these notebooks should have at least a dual-core processor. It is expected that the following software has been installed on the notebook by the participants in advance: a FORTRAN90/95 compiler, an MPI library, the netCDF library (not later than version 3.6.3), graphics software to display netCDF data (preferably NCL), the Korn- or bash shell (ksh, bash), as well as subversion (a revision control system necessary to download the PALM code). subversion is already a part of many Linux distributions (e.g. openSuSe). The lecturers will be Siegfried Raasch, and other members of the PALM group from the Institute of Meteorology and Climatology, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany.

Costs / fee
The participant fee will be 500€. This includes tuition, seminar handouts and a welcome party. Accommodation costs, other meals, and transport costs are not included.

Further information and Registration
In case of any further (technical) questions about the seminar, please send an email to Helge Knoop (​knoop@meteo.uni-hannover.de). For registration, send an email with your name, status (master student, PhD student, etc.), and current affiliation to the above named email address, not later than 15th June 2014. The number of participants is limited to a maximum of 20. Successful participants and method of payment will be announced beginning of July 2014. Registered participants will receive more detailed information (location plan, detailed schedule, etc.) at the same time.