Weather and climate centers around the world use high-performance computing to power the modeling and simulation they rely on to forecast not only our planet’s day-to-day conditions, but what Mother Nature is likely to have in store for the future. In areas like numerical weather prediction (NWP), climate prediction, and ocean modeling, HPC facilitates the prediction of what’s next.
HPC processing power continues to get faster and more powerful, with exascale right around the corner. Researchers can get more done in less time than ever before and can generate higher-fidelity models for more accurate forecasts.
But with added power comes added complexity, and because downtime is not an option, Altair and the Cylc community have collaborated on an out-of-the-box workload management solution that keeps weather and climate sites running efficiently around the clock. Altair has packaged the industry-leading Altair® PBS Professional® workload manager with the community-based Cylc workflow engine, both already popular choices at many of the world’s biggest weather and climate centers, including Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. The collaboration between the Cylc community and Altair, packaged as the Altair Weather Solution, not only combines two of the weather and climate industry’s leading workload management tools, but is the product of years of work from industry experts including Cylc creator Dr. Hilary Oliver and engineering teams from Altair and the Bureau of Meteorology.
Cylc for cycling workflows
Cylc is an open-source Python workflow engine that was created to handle cycling systems and a range of workflow complexities. It automatically executes tasks according to detailed schedules and dependencies and is especially useful in areas including weather and climate modeling, NWP, data processing, and physics simulation.
Dr. Hilary Oliver, senior research software engineer at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), designed Cylc to run tasks as soon as dependencies are met. It runs with maximum concurrency to make efficient use of HPC resources. Ongoing Cylc development is a collaboration between NIWA, the Met Office (UK), the Center of Excellence for Weather and Climate Simulation in Europe (ESiWACE), the Bureau of Meteorology, and additional contributors.
The Altair Weather Solution
The Altair Weather Solution is purpose-built for the industry, combining top-flight workload management by PBS Professional with cycling workflow orchestration by Cylc. It delivers a single control panel packaged with a schedule prediction tool and insight into Cylc and PBS Professional events. With schedule prediction, weather solution users can easily visualize the cadence of past model runs and predict future runs. Event insight means at-your-fingertips troubleshooting for issues that may come up with model runs.
Weather Solution users get ease of deployment, expert customer service, and ongoing support. As an open-source offering, Cylc uses an unsupported, community-based model, but Altair provides commercial support to Cylc users, if desired, for sites also running PBS Professional.
Upcoming webinar
Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, June 16 (APAC region) or Thursday, June 18 (EMEA and Americas) to find out how some of the world’s biggest weather sites orchestrate cycling workflows with advanced HPC tools like Cylc and PBS Professional.
Cylc creator Dr. Hilary Oliver will talk about Cylc and how it’s being used today to facilitate weather and climate science. Altair’s own software development VP David Block will host the discussion, addressing the unique demands of this vertical with Dr. Oliver and detailing how Altair and Cylc collaborate on this turnkey weather solution.
Register here to save your place for the webinar.