Swiss Weather Forecasting Achieves 1.1km Resolution on ‘Piz Kesch’

By John Russell

April 1, 2016

After six months of tweaking – producing a 20 percent reduction in time-to-solution for weather forecasting – MeteoSwiss, the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, today reported its next generation COSMO-1 forecasting system is now operational. COSMO-1 requires 20 times the computing power of COSMO-2 and runs on the hybrid CPU-GPU supercomputer, Piz Kesch, operated by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) and custom built in collaboration with Cray and NVIDIA.

COSMO-1 was put into service last September (see, Today’s Outlook: GPU-accelerated Weather Forecasting, HPCwire) and improves resolution from 2.2 km to 1.1 km over COSMO-2, an important advance, particularly for Alpine topography forecasts where high spatial resolution is required to accurately predict local weather events such as thunderstorms and thermally induced mountain and valley wind systems.

Each node on the MeteoSwiss system has 8 GPUs, which cumulatively deliver 90 percent of the flops (48 CPUs and 192 K80s). The two cabinets of the Cray CS-Storm supercomputer at CSCS are tightly packed and together deliver 282.5 teraflops (LINPACK), sufficient to give this system TOP500 standing. Each cabinet consists of 12 hybrid computing nodes for a total of 96 NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU accelerators and 24 Intel Haswell CPUs. CSCS says the hybrid system performs simulations, which are three times more energy-efficient and twice as fast as conventional CPUs.

Weather forecasting has always been computationally intensive. Generally speaking, a weather model samples the state of the atmosphere at a given time, and uses fluid motion and thermodynamics equations to predict the state of the atmosphere at some time in the future. The model divides a forecast region into a grid, and the equations are solved within each grid cell with interactions between the neighboring cells to compute a prediction. The closer grid points are to one another, the higher the overall model resolution which leads to increased realism in the final forecast.

Figure 1: View of the COSMO-1 model area; and the detailed images of the Valle Maggia produced by COSMO-1 (left) and COSMO-2 (right).
Figure 1: View of the COSMO-1 model area; and the detailed images of the Valle Maggia produced by COSMO-1 (left) and COSMO-2 (right).

Optimizing COSMO-1 code — even before going live in September — was a significant effort and important to achieving initial performance gains. Weather forecasting apps are typically 10–20-years old or more, and tend to be written in Fortran, according to Roy Kim, group product manager of accelerated computing at NVIDIA. A combination of CUDA and OpenACC were used to optimize and port the code for GPUs.

In labeling the new COSMO-1 systems as now operational, “we have contractual constraints that we can actually deliver with a certain reliability and within a certain time frame,” said Oliver Fuher, a team leader at MeteoSwiss. The spec requires a single day forecast to be completed in a half-hour. When fired up in September, COSMO-1 was slightly above that limit. Tweaks included, for example, speeding inter-GPU communication, including the MPI communications, adopting asynchronous communication, and increasing the parallelism in the code. The hardware, he reports, was very stable.

“This is the first time we’ve run on such a hybrid system. We didn’t have a lot of experience with how the system behaves, [for example] if you have failures, what the procedures to cope with those are. These nodes are fat and when one node goes down you basically lose a lot of the computational power in your system,” said Fuher. “We updated the software environment, updated the libraries, and updated the SLURM scheduler. On the hardware side things stayed pretty constant.”

As a rule, weather forecasting today uses complex programs, so-called numerical models, which simulate developments in the atmosphere based on numerical formulae. MeteoSwiss uses the COSMO model, which has been developed in collaboration with the international Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO).

The complex software codes have been steadily upgraded in preparation for the switchover to a GPU-based computer system during the last five years. In this effort, MeteoSwiss collaborated closely with ETH Zurich researchers, C2SM and CSCS, under the umbrella of the HP2C (High Performance and High Productivity Computing) and PASC (Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing) initiatives.

Now in full production mode, COSMO-1 will be run every three hours for forecasts of up to 33 hours into the future. For warnings concerning the following day, simulations will be run once a day looking out 45 hours ahead, according to MeteoSwiss. Operation of COSMO-2 is scheduled to cease in autumn 2016.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from its predecessors, including the red-hot H100 and A100 GPUs. Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. While Nvidia may not spring to mind when thinking of the quant Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Meet the HPE Mentors

March 18, 2024

The latest installment of the 2024 Winter Classic Studio Update Show features our interview with the HPE mentor team who introduced our student teams to the joys (and potential sorrows) of the HPL (LINPACK) and accompany Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the field was normalized for boys in 1969 when the Apollo 11 missi Read more…

Apple Buys DarwinAI Deepening its AI Push According to Report

March 14, 2024

Apple has purchased Canadian AI startup DarwinAI according to a Bloomberg report today. Apparently the deal was done early this year but still hasn’t been publicly announced according to the report. Apple is preparing Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimization algorithms to iteratively refine their parameters until Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimizat Read more…

PASQAL Issues Roadmap to 10,000 Qubits in 2026 and Fault Tolerance in 2028

March 13, 2024

Paris-based PASQAL, a developer of neutral atom-based quantum computers, yesterday issued a roadmap for delivering systems with 10,000 physical qubits in 2026 a Read more…

India Is an AI Powerhouse Waiting to Happen, but Challenges Await

March 12, 2024

The Indian government is pushing full speed ahead to make the country an attractive technology base, especially in the hot fields of AI and semiconductors, but Read more…

Charles Tahan Exits National Quantum Coordination Office

March 12, 2024

(March 1, 2024) My first official day at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was June 15, 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 loc Read more…

AI Bias In the Spotlight On International Women’s Day

March 11, 2024

What impact does AI bias have on women and girls? What can people do to increase female participation in the AI field? These are some of the questions the tech Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Analyst Panel Says Take the Quantum Computing Plunge Now…

November 27, 2023

Should you start exploring quantum computing? Yes, said a panel of analysts convened at Tabor Communications HPC and AI on Wall Street conference earlier this y Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Training of 1-Trillion Parameter Scientific AI Begins

November 13, 2023

A US national lab has started training a massive AI brain that could ultimately become the must-have computing resource for scientific researchers. Argonne N Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire