Clustering the Planet: An Exascale Approach to Determining Global Climatype Zones

We present an exascale approach for producing global scale, high resolution, longitudinally based geoclimate classifications. Using a GPU implementation of the DUO Similarity Metric on the Summit supercomputer, we calculated the pairwise environmental similarity of 156,384,190 vectors of 414,640 encoded elements derived from 71 environmental variables over a 50-year time span at 1km2 resolution. GPU matrix-matrix (GEMM) kernels were optimized for the GPU architecture and their outputs were managed through aggressive concurrent MPI rank CPU communication, calculations, and transfers. Using vector transformation and highly optimized operations of generalized distributed dense linear algebra, calculation of all-vector-pairs similarity resulted in 5.07 x 1021 element comparisons and reached a peak performance of 2.31 exaflops. We demonstrated this method using existing and synthesized climate layers to show how geography can be parsed using high-performance computing. Geoclimate zones are important tools for understanding how environmental variables impact natural systems, particularly for agriculture and conservation with relevance to climate change. Historically, classification systems have been low resolution, based on limited variables, or subjective. To identify climate classes, we clustered DUO outputs at varying stringency, producing 69, 133, 340, and 717 global geoclimate zones. Our approach produced global scale, high resolution, longitudinally informed climate classifications that can be used in precision agriculture, cultivar breeding efforts, and conservation programs.