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. It can freely be used for scientific research.

Some of PALM's highlights are

• excellent scaling, so far tested up to 10000 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 available, including turbulence recycling method to allow for a turbulent inflow
• code can be switched to ocean version, including salinity equation and equation of state for seawater
• a parallelized Lagrangian particle model is embedded, which can be used for various applications (footprint calculation, simulation of cloud droplet growth, visualization, etc.)
• code has an interface which allows users to plug in their own extensions without modifying the default code
• code is permanently maintained and improved by the PALM group and other users; code management is based on subversion
• advanced shell scripts for installing and running the code in interactive and batch mode are available

Access

If your are interested in using or just testing the code, just send an ​email including a username and a password that you like to use to access the code. This account will also allow you to login on this trac-server, e.g. to submit trouble tickets, or to edit the wiki, if you have proper access permissions.

....The original version of which was developed from 1997-1999 at IMUK. This model is optimized for use on massively parallel computers, and it is therefore very well suited for simulations with an extremely large number of grid points. The current supercomputer of the North German Supercomputing Center "Norddeutscher Verbund für Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnen" (HLRN), an SGI-ICE machine with 12000 cores, allows calculations with up to 4096³ grid points.