The Earth System Science Numerical Simulator Facility (EarthLab), the first major national science and technology infrastructure in the Huairou Comprehensive National Science Center, centers on the numerical simulation software of various spheres of the Earth system with matching software and hardware, and its scale and comprehensive technical level are at the forefront of the world. Through the construction of the project, a dedicated Earth system science numerical simulator facility integrating "model, calculation and data" has been built, which is able to quantitatively describe and simulate the complex process of all the spheres of the Earth system on a meso-scale, promoting the interdisciplinary studies and integration of different disciplines in Earth system science. The legal entity of the facility is the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and Tsinghua University is a co-building institution.

The Earth System Science Numerical Simulator Facility consists of five systems: System I, the Numerical Earth Modelling System; System II, the High-Resolution Regional Environment Numerical Modelling System; System III, the Super Simulation Support and Management System (SSSMS); System IV, the Supporting Database, Data Assimilation, and Visualization System; and System V, the High-Performance Computing System. Tsinghua University is responsible for five construction tasks of the three systems, including: the Regional High-Precision Long-term Climate Change Risk Modeling Subsystem and the Drought Modeling Subsystem for Grain Crops in Major Agricultural Regions of System II, System III, the Super Simulation Support and Management System (SSSMS), and the IVI Translation and Network Management Subsystem of the High-speed Internet Project and the Metropolitan High-speed Internet Project of System V.

The Regional High-Precision Long-term Climate Change Risk Modeling Subsystem has realized the statistical downscaling capability of climate change simulation and prediction data from the global 100-km resolution to the regional 3-km resolution . Based on the high-performance earth numerical simulator facility, measures such as arbitrary regional cutting and multi-core parallel computing are adopted to solve the problem of low operating efficiency of high-precision statistical downscaling, and increase the running speed of statistical downscaling by 5-7 times.

The Drought Modeling Subsystem for Grain Crops in Major Agricultural Regions of China and the World has realized the functions of global near-real-time agricultural land use monitoring, global dynamic simulation of food crops and daily yield forecast. The data are widely used by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and other domestic and overseas institutions, and support the Annual Report on Remote Sensing Monitoring of Global Ecological Environment of the National Remote Sensing Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Tsinghua University is responsible for the overall design and development of the Super Simulation Support and Management System (SSSMS), which has the support functions of bottom-level code development and transplantation, debugging and optimization, and computing environment optimization, as well as the management functions of user-oriented mode test, evaluation and optimization. The developed coupler C-Coupler2 is superior to the couplers in Europe and America. In the whole EarthLab, the super simulation support and management system can flexibly and efficiently support the whole process of R&D of the design, development, debugging, verification, release and application of the Earth system model. Aerospace Hongtu Information Technology Co., Ltd. undertook the final assembly and integration task of the project.

Flow chart of super support and management system

The high-speed Internet project IVI Translation and Network Management Subsystem and Metropolitan High-speed Internet, in light of the current situation that a large number of supercomputing software systems are still IPv4, took the lead to propose the use of the stateless IPv4/IPv6 translation transition technology (IVI), which has become the IETF Internet international standard, and developed an IPv4/IPv6 interconnection server cluster system customized for supercomputing systems, supporting IPv4 private network services through IPv6 and the interconnection of IPv4 and IPv6 applications.

In the construction of the large-scale facility, Tsinghua University has fully leveraged the interdisciplinary advantages of earth system science, computer science and technology, contributing Tsinghua's wisdom for the construction of “the pillars of a great power”.

Written by Huang Xiaomeng and Lin Lin