Job of the Week: Director of Computing at ECMWF

“Supercomputing capability plays a key role in ECMWF’s success and in its ability to implement its strategic vision to 2025. In order to meet the required flexibility for future growth, ECMWF’s data centre is being relocated to Bologna, Italy and will be operational in 2020. The new Director of Computing will be responsible for delivering this challenging transition, fit-out and transformation, whilst ensuring that ECMWF’s computing capability continues to support some of the most critical scientific advances of our time.”

Video: Weather and Climate Modeling at Convection-Resolving Resolution

David Leutwyler from ETH Zurich gave this talk at the 2017 Chaos Communication Congress. “The representation of thunderstorms (deep convection) and rain showers in climate models represents a major challenge, as this process is usually approximated with semi-empirical parameterizations due to the lack of appropriate computational resolution. Climate simulations using kilometer-scale horizontal resolution allow explicitly resolving deep convection and thus allow for an improved representation of the water cycle. We present a set of such simulations covering Europe and global computational domains.”

NOAA Looks to Dell for Massive Supercomputing Upgrade

Today NOAA announced to plans for a major upgrade to its supercomputing capabilities. The upgrade adds 2.8 petaflops of computational power, enabling NOAA’s National Weather Service to implement the next generation Global Forecast System, known as the “American Model,” next year. “Having more computing speed and capacity positions us to collect and process even more data from our newest satellites — GOES-East, NOAA-20 and GOES-S — to meet the growing information and decision-support needs of our emergency management partners, the weather industry and the public.”

Engility To Provide NOAA With HPC Expertise

Today Engility announced $14 million in task order awards from NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Engility scientists will conduct HPC software development and optimization, help users gain scientific insights, and maintain cyber security controls on NOAA’s R&D High Performance Computing System. These services assist NOAA GFDL in enhancing and advancing their HPC capability to explore and understand climate and weather. “As we saw with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, a deeper understanding of climate and weather are critical to America’s preparedness, infrastructure and security stance,” said Lynn Dugle, CEO of Engility. “Engility has been at the forefront of leveraging HPC to advance scientific discovery and solve the toughest engineering problems. HPC is, and will continue to be, an area of high interest and value among our customers as they seek to analyze huge and ever-expanding data sets.”

Supercomputers turn the clock back on Storms with “Hindcasting”

Researchers are using supercomputers at LBNL to determine how global climate change has affected the severity of storms and resultant flooding. “The group used the publicly available model, which can be used to forecast future weather, to “hindcast” the conditions that led to the Sept. 9-16, 2013 flooding around Boulder, Colorado.”

Video: Scaling Climate and Weather Forecasting on Sunway TaihuLight

Haohuan Fu from Tsinghua University in China at the PASC17 conference in Lugano. “This talk reports efforts on refactoring and optimizing the climate and weather forecasting programs – CAM and WRF – on Sunway TaihuLight. To map the large code base to the millions of cores on the Sunway system, OpenACC-based refactoring was taken as the major approach, with source-to-source translator tools applied to exploit the most suitable parallelism for the CPE cluster and to fit the intermediate variable into the limited on-chip fast buffer.”

Top Weather and Climate Sites run on DDN Storage

“DDN’s unique ability to handle tough application I/O profiles at speed and scale gives weather and climate organizations the infrastructure they need for rapid, high-fidelity modeling,” said Laura Shepard, senior director of product marketing, DDN. “These capabilities are essential to DDN’s growing base of weather and climate organizations, which are at the forefront of scientific research and advancements – from whole climate atmospheric and oceanic modeling to hurricane and severe weather emergency preparedness to the use of revolutionary, new, high-resolution satellite imagery in weather forecasting.”

Will ECMWF Move Supercomputing to Italy?

Weather and climate simulation services could soon be run in Europe rather than the UK as it was announced that the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is proposing to move its supercomputing capabilities to a new data centre located in Italy.

Dr. Peter Bauer from ECMWF to Keynote ISC 2017

Today ISC 2017 announced that their Tuesday keynote will be delivered by Dr. Peter Bauer from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). As Deputy Director of the Research Department Center at ECMWF, Dr. Bauer will discuss the computing and data challenges, as well as the current avenues the weather and climate prediction community is taking in preparing for the new computing era.

Supercomputing Sandstorm Forecasts at BSC

“Over the past 15 years, a number of factors have resulted in an increase in the frequency, intensity, and operational impact of sand and dust storms in the Middle East and surrounding areas,” said Bob Richard, vice president, ARINC Direct for Rockwell Collins. “Integrating high-resolution forecast information into our flight and international trip support services will provide safety and performance benefits for business aviation operators in the region.”