Great moments in the History of FOAM


The FOAM project began in Fall of 1994 as part of the DOE Computer Hardware, Advanced Mathematics and Model Physics (CHAMMP) program. Further development was supported the DOE Climate Change Prediction Program.

The development of FOAM was a joint effort between scientists in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory and the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The parallel river transport model within FOAM was developed in Spring, 1995.

The first beta version of FOAM (fully coupled with an early version of PCCM2 at T21) ran successfully on May 18, 1995.  (1 day in 8 minutes on 16 nodes of an IBM SP1)

Change from a single-node coupler to a distributed coupler in October of 1995

Change from using T21 atmosphere to R15 atmosphere:  July, 1996

The CCM3 physics were incorporated into FOAM's version of PCCM2 in December, 1996.

The 650 year run of  FOAM 1.0 was completed in November, 1997 on the IBM SP2 at Argonne.

FOAM was ported to the Origin 2000 at NCAR in December of 1998.

Significant re-factoring and other cleanup of the FOAM source code was done in Spring of 2000.

Bug fixes to FOAM and upgrade to CCM3.6 atmospheric physics was done in Spring of 2000.

The initial replacement of FOAM's sea ice model with CSIM 2.2.6 was done in the Spring of 2000

Final debugging of the new sea ice model was completed in Summer of 2001

Conversion of FOAM's ocean model to 24 levels was done in early Winter of 2001

FOAM 1.5 was frozen in February, 2002

See FOAM Version history for further development.

FOAM development continues under the DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program and also under the NSF ITR program.

 

The original FOAM development team:
At UW-Madison:
John Anderson (PI)
Robert Jacob

At Argonne:
Ian Foster (PI)
Chad Schafer
Michael Tobis


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