Oceananigans.jl is a Julia package for simulating incompressible geophysical fluid dynamics on CPUs and GPUs.
It uses finite-volume methods to solve nonhydrostatic and hydrostatic Boussinesq equations and is designed for applications ranging from idealised turbulence experiments to high-resolution ocean modelling. The package provides high-level model and simulation interfaces while retaining control over grids, advection schemes, turbulence closures, boundary conditions, tracers and numerical solvers.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Finite-volume simulation of incompressible geophysical fluid dynamics with high-level model and simulation interfaces.
- Nonhydrostatic and hydrostatic free-surface Boussinesq models.
- Shallow-water model support.
- Runs on CPUs and multiple GPU backends while using the same model configuration approach.
- CUDA, AMDGPU, Metal and oneAPI GPU support through Julia extensions.
- Distributed execution with MPI and multi-GPU communication support for larger simulations.
- Rectilinear, latitude-longitude, cubed-sphere and immersed-boundary grids for idealised and global domains.
- High-order advection methods including WENO schemes for momentum and tracer transport.
- Configurable tracers, buoyancy formulations and Coriolis effects.
- Multiple turbulence closures, viscosities and diffusivities for representing unresolved mixing processes.
- Flexible value, flux, gradient and immersed boundary conditions.
- Hydrostatic free-surface algorithms including split-explicit time integration.
- Lagrangian particle tracking alongside Eulerian velocity and tracer fields.
- Output support through formats and packages including JLD2, NetCDF and Zarr, with configurable output writers for simulation diagnostics.
- GPU-portable kernels built with KernelAbstractions.jl.
- Optional automatic-differentiation support through Enzyme.jl for differentiable numerical workflows.
Website: github.com/CliMA/Oceananigans.jl
Support:
Developer: Climate Modeling Alliance and contributors
License: MIT License
Oceananigans.jl is written in Julia. Learn Julia with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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