Or to give it it’s full name: Symposium on HPC and Data-Intensive Applications in Earth Sciences: Challenges and Opportunities@ICTP, Trieste, Italy.

I gave two talks at this meeting, the first in the HPC regular session, on behalf of my colleague Pier Luigi Vidale, on UPSCALE, the second a data keynote on day two.

Weather and Climate modelling at the Petascale: achievements and perspectives. The roadmap to PRIMAVERA

Presentation: pdf (37 MB).

Abstract:

Recent results and plans from the Joint Met Office/NERC High Resolution Climate Modelling programme are presented, along with a summary of recent and planned model developments. We show the influence of high resolution on a number of important atmospheric phenomena, highlighting both the roles of multiple groups in the work and the need for further resolution and complexity improvements in multiple models. We introduce plans for a project to do just that. A final point is that this work is highly demanding of both the supercomputing and subsequent analysis environments.

Infrastructure for Environmental Supercomputing: beyond the HPC!

Abstract:

We begin by motivating the problems facing us in environmental simulations across scales: complex community interactions, and complex infrastructure. Looking forward we see the drive to increased resolution and complexity leading not only to compute issues, but even more severe data storage and handling issues. We worry about the software consequences before moving to the only possible solution, more and better collaboration, with shared infrastructure. To make progress requires moving past consideration of software interfaces alone to consider also the “collaboration” interfaces. We spend considerable time describing the JASMIN HPC data collaboration environment in the UK, before reaching the final conclusion: Getting our models to run on (new) supercomputers is hard. Getting them to run perfomantly is hard. Analysing, exploiting and archiving the data is (probably) now even harder!

Presentation: pdf (22 MB )