HPC and numerical modeling tools at the Chilean Weather

Rodrigo Delgado Urzúa
Operative HPC services and infrastructure
Modeling and development (R&D) office
Dirección Meteorológica de Chile – www.meteochile.cl
RISC/UChile Workshop, 29 - 30 march 2012
Introduction: what we do, what we don’t, who we
depend from
• The Chilean Weather Service (Dirección Meteorológica de Chile, DMC)
Current numerical modeling work at the DMC
Projected computing demands and on-going projects
Provide forecasts, warnings, weather and
climate information for aviation purposes and other
activities; perform studies and research in all its
applications; manage and preserve all
national weather information; with the aim to
mitigate damage from weather events, helping
to protect people, property and contribute to the
socio-economic development of the country, in a
framework of efficiency, effectiveness and according
to national and international quality standards.
Director
Forecasts
subdept.
National
Analysis Center
Aeronautics
meteorology
Climatology
subdept.
Instrumentation
Climatology
Applied
meteorology
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Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) was
born at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton in 1940’s – first electronic computer
Since then, NWP has been one of the
heaviest users of supercomputers.
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
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Take the equations of fluid mechanics and
thermodynamics that describe atmospheric
processes.
Convert them to a form where they can be
programmed into a large computer.
Solve them so that this software
representation of the atmosphere evolves
within the computer.
This is called a “model” of the atmosphere
Numerical
modeling
Forecast
process
Other
tools
2001
2004
2008
2011
• First operational
mesoscale
simulation
performed
in Chile.
•A new cluster is
put into service,
leading to an
increase in
resolution (4 km).
Such cluster is
composed of dual
Xeon nodes with
Dolphin
interconnect
• Operational
forecasting of
ozone, using the
same computing
infrastructure
acquired in 2004.
• Rental of a HPC
Cluster solution
• Chile covered
with simulations
up to 12 km of
horizontal
resolution.
Weather
forecast
Climatic
forecasts
Air quality /
Chemiical
weather forecast
MM5
PRECIS
Polyphemus
DBCRAS
CMM5
CCATTBRAMS
WRF
CWRF
Cassmassi
(PMCA)
ETA
RAMS
WRF-Chem
Iowa
North region
Central region
South region
Austral (Southern)
region
North zone
South zone
Central zone
Austral (Southern)
zone
Santiago
Humidity vertical profiles
provided by MODIS
DBCRAS
Data assimilation on site
Punta Arenas
Ozone concentrations
Air quality forecast
Dynamic seasonal forecast
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Public sector partnerships
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National Agriculture Institute (INIA)
National Geology and Mining Service (SERNAGEOMIN)
Agriculture Ministry
[…]
Research partnerships
 Universidad de Chile, Pontificia Universidad Católica, Universidad de
Valparaíso, […]
 Centro de Estudios Científicos
 INPE/CPTEC (BR), CNEA (AR)
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Private funded initiatives
 Endesa Eco (Renewable energy production)
 Several mining industry contracts (past and present)
 Insurance companies
132 computing cores (Xeon
Westmere) + 24 support cores
Infiniband QDR
Nvidia Tesla for R+D
30 TB storage over IB
Puelche
576 GB RAM
Atmosphere. Dynamical system highly sensitive to initial conditions. The
errors are propagated and amplified rapidly.
There will never exist perfect initial condition for initialization of an
atmospheric numerical model, ergo we do not know how accurate is the
final solution of this (deterministic model).
If we run multiple models with perturbed initial conditions, trying to capture
the uncertainty of the initial state, we will have multiple final possible
solutions.
Using statistics on these multiple outputs can have an idea about the
uncertainty of the solution.
Ensemble
forecasting
Puelche
20 members
+ control
using
dynamic
downscaling
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Atmospheric modeling
systems: 1.2 TB per day,
24x7 operation.
Acquisition systems of
satellite data: 300 GB
per day, saved about 30
GB per day.
Data acquisition systems
on the ground (stations):
1 for variable data every
~5 minutes, 100+
stations. Legal
obligation to store
everything.
Output
analysis
Dynamic
model
Forecast
BC+IC
3DVAR
4DVAR
Verification
Obs.