This computation involved: High Resolution Global Environmental Model (HiGEM) deployed on HPCx. The model code itself is based on the weather forecasting model of the Met Office. It solves forms of the Navier Stokes equations and simulates the many complex processes in the atmosphere, ocean, ice and land surface.

The HIGEM code was developed in the NERC community from Unified Model Version V6.1, and involved improving the resolution and a number of bug fixes.
The atmosphere of HiGEM is 30 km deep with 38 vertical levels, L38. The horizontal resolution is 1.25 degrees of longitude by 0.83 degrees of latitude, N144, which produces a global grid of 288 by 217 grid cells. The oceanic component of HiGEM is 5 km deep with 40 vertical levels. The horizontal resolution is 0.333 degrees of longitude by 0.333 degrees of latitude, which produces a global grid of 1082 by 540 grid cells. The HPCx system comprises 160 IBM POWER5 eServer nodes, i.e. 2560 processors, delivering 15.36 TeraFlop/s peak, or 12.9 TeraFlops/s sustained (as rated in the Top500 list). The system is equipped with 5.12 TByte of memory and 72 TByte of disk.