PALM - A PArallelized Large-Eddy Simulation Model for Atmospheric and Oceanic Flows

PALM is a large-eddy simulation (LES) model for atmospheric and oceanic flows which is especially designed for performing on massively parallel computer architectures. PALM is free software. It can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License (v3).

A PALM simulation using the letters "PALM" as surface heat flux pattern. Check out the gallery for more movies!

Some of PALM's highlights are

• excellent scaling, so far tested up to 32000 cores
• online data analysis (during model runs) in order to avoid I/O bottlenecks
• topography realized on cartesian grid (allows for steep topography)
• non-cyclic horizontal boundary conditions including turbulent inflow
• code can be switched to ocean version with salinity equation and equation of state for seawater
• embedded parallelized Lagrangian particle model for various applications (footprint calculation, simulation of cloud droplet growth, visualization, etc.)
• interface which allows users to plug in their own code extensions without modifying the default code
• advanced shell scripts for installing and running the code in interactive and batch mode are available
• code is permanently maintained and improved by the PALM group and other users; code management is based on subversion

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PALM news

[ 2014/10/21 ] New code structure for the embedded plant canopy model (details)
[ 2014/07/23 ] The PALM group has contributed a visualization to the ​VAPOR Gallery
[ 2014/07/14 ] The PALM group/IMUK joined the Center for Wind Energy Research (​ForWind)
[ 2014/07/07 ] The PALM group has now its own ​Youtube Cannel and a new visualization has been added to the Gallery
[ 2014/03/19 ] PALM is now part of the SPEC ACCEL benchmark test for intensive parallel applications running under OpenACC (​more)
[ 2013/10/30 ] Nudging technique implemented (see here)

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PALM users world map