Ohlsen, Simon (2022) Dataflow Analysis of the Earth System Model MITgcm. (Bachelor thesis), Kiel University, Kiel, 50 pp.

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Abstract

Many of the earth system models (ESMs) used today, e.g., for climate forecasting and ocean modeling, are originally from the late 1990s. The long lifespan and still ongoing development makes them potentially vulnerable to architectural degradation and thus less maintainable and flexible. Therefore, there are efforts to better understand, modernize, and future-proof their software architecture. To achieve this, the software architecture of the ESM must be reconstructed.
With this thesis, we contribute to the OceanDSL project by reconstructing the architecture of the ESM Massachusetts Institute of Technology General Circulation Model (MITgcm). Since ESMs are data-centric applications, we develop a static dataflow analysis procedure based on an abstract syntax tree of the ESM’s Fortran source code to extract dataflow information and reconstruct the dataflow-based architecture. This requires the identification of dataflow relevant structures in Fortran, enhancing the given architectural meta-model and the tools provided by OceanDSL, as well as the evaluation of the tooling based on different variants of the MITgcm. We assess the reconstructed architectures by comparing them to the architecture description provided by the MITgcm documentation and using various metrics. As a result, we identified COMMON blocks as key components in the interprocedural dataflow of the MITgcm and were able to recover selected design decisions of the descriptive architecture.

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