The Adjoint MIT Ocean General Circulation Model

Area: Oceanography

The task of minimizing a cost function measuring the ocean simulation vs. observation misfit is achieved through efficient calculation of the cost gradient w.r.t. a set of controls via the adjoint technique. The adjoint code of the parallel MIT general circulation model is generated using TAMC or its successor TAF. To achieve a tractable problem in both CPU and memory requirements, in the light of control flow reversal, the adjoint code relies heavily on the balancing of storing vs. recomputation via the checkpointing method. Further savings are achieved by exploiting self-adjointness of part of the computation. To retain scalability of domain decomposition based parallelism, hand-written adjoint routines are provided. These complement routines of the parallel support package to perform corresponding operations in reverse mode. The unique feature of the TAF tool which enables to dump the adjoint state and restart the adjoint integration is exploited to overcome batch execution limitations on HPC machines for large-scale ocean and climate simulations.