ORBIT: Oak Ridge Base Foundation Model for Earth System Predictability

TL;DR

ORBIT is a large-scale, advanced vision transformer model with 113 billion parameters, designed to improve Earth system predictability by leveraging high-performance computing and novel parallelism techniques.

Contribution

The paper introduces ORBIT, the largest Earth system prediction model to date, utilizing a novel hybrid tensor-data orthogonal parallelism to scale up to 113 billion parameters.

Findings

Achieves 684 petaFLOPS to 1.6 exaFLOPS throughput on Frontier supercomputer.

Maintains high scaling efficiency (41% to 85%) across 49,152 GPUs.

Surpasses existing climate AI models by a thousandfold in size.

Abstract

Earth system predictability is challenged by the complexity of environmental dynamics and the multitude of variables involved. Current AI foundation models, although advanced by leveraging large and heterogeneous data, are often constrained by their size and data integration, limiting their effectiveness in addressing the full range of Earth system prediction challenges. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Oak Ridge Base Foundation Model for Earth System Predictability (ORBIT), an advanced vision transformer model that scales up to 113 billion parameters using a novel hybrid tensor-data orthogonal parallelism technique. As the largest model of its kind, ORBIT surpasses the current climate AI foundation model size by a thousandfold. Performance scaling tests conducted on the Frontier supercomputer have demonstrated that ORBIT achieves 684 petaFLOPS to 1.6 exaFLOPS sustained throughput, with scaling efficiency maintained at 41% to 85% across 49,152 AMD GPUs. These breakthroughs establish new advances in AI-driven climate modeling and demonstrate promise to significantly improve the Earth system predictability.