Carbon Cycle Modeling
Every year the world's forests and oceans quietly absorb over half of human CO2 emissions — modeling exactly how is a computational challenge in its own right.
Image: Peggy Greb, USDA ARS
Tracking Carbon Through a Living Planet
Carbon cycle modeling couples biogeochemistry to physical climate: plant photosynthesis and respiration, soil microbial decomposition, ocean carbonate chemistry, and land-use change all interact non-linearly with rising CO2 and warming. Malgukke provides the mixed CPU/GPU fabric needed to run these land- and ocean-biogeochemistry models at global resolution alongside the physical climate core, so that the carbon budget itself becomes a first-class simulated variable rather than an afterthought.
HPC Solution Architecture: Emission to Sink Attribution
A biogeochemical modeling pipeline, comparable to E3SM-class carbon-climate runs:
Running on the TOP500: Perlmutter
Perlmutter — NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Perlmutter debuted at No. 5 on the June 2021 TOP500 list with 64.6 Pflop/s and remains one of the U.S. Department of Energy's flagship systems, now heavily used for AI-accelerated Earth system science. Its hybrid CPU/GPU nodes run the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) in multi-scale carbon-climate configurations, and NERSC has specifically highlighted Perlmutter's role in CO2 fixation and carbon-sink research.
Yes — this is a real, currently operating DOE system that has held a TOP500 top-5 position and continues to run the carbon-cycle workloads described on this page, even as newer exascale machines have since surpassed its original ranking.
Voices from the Field
Researchers quantifying the global carbon budget and the planetary boundaries it feeds into:
Clemens Schwingshackl
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU)
On the Global Carbon Budget 2025 findings and why global fossil CO2 emissions keep rising.
Read interviewBoris Sakschewski
Earth System Analysis, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
On the Planetary Health Check finding that seven of nine critical Earth system boundaries have now been breached.
Read interview