SD3: The First Operationally-Proven, Fully Heterogeneous-Accelerated Global Kilometer-Scale Model with Inline Physics Architecture
arXiv:2610.39334
Yuan Liang, Xiaomin Hu, Xi Chen, Jingsheng Zhu, Li Yang, Leisheng Li, Qian Song, Xu Wang, Hao Wang, Zhenzhen Wang, Huiyuan Li
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SD3 is a CUDA-native global kilometer-scale weather model that couples dynamics and fast physics inline and claims 205.7 simulated days per day at 1.5 km on 24,576 GPUs.
Read free explainer →We present Super Dynamics on the Cube (SD3), the first operationally-proven, fully heterogeneous-accelerated global kilometer-scale model. Through a full-stack reconstruction in native CUDA C, SD3 introduces an "Inline Physics" architecture that deeply couples its non-hydrostatic cubed-sphere dynamical core with fast physical processes. This design maintains high physical consistency, ensures energy and mass conservation, and mitigates "Grey Zone" mismatches. Five years of continuous operational forecasting, together with validation against diverse observations, demonstrates the scientific fidelity of SD3. Recently, SD3 achieved an unprecedented 205.7 simulated days per day at global 1.5 km resolution using 24576 GPUs. SD3 establishes a hardware-agnostic, portable, and reproducible paradigm across diverse Exascale ecosystems. Beyond weather and climate research, SD3 offers a transformative paradigm for the HPC community and the next-generation Digital Twin Earth to establish a robust, high-performance blueprint for the future of Earth system modeling.