The glue that holds it together: NCAR's Model Coupling Library

The Model Coupling Library (MCL) is a robust, adaptable communication library developed at NCAR which supports message passing between coupled climate model components on a variety of platforms. MCL supports message passing over HIPPI IP sockets, PVM, named pipes and System V shared memory calls. MCL also incorporates error handling capabilities including graceful shutdown. timeout and retry. The MCL has been used since May 1996 as an official part of the Climate System Model (CSM). We present performance results for MCL under a variety of production and experimental configurations. This will include results of coupling PVP's at two centers separated by 2000 km, using the vBNS, an OC3 ATM network, with a sustained data transfer rate of 4 Mbytes/sec.