P40 Enhancing community collaborations through NWP software containers

Harrold, Michelle, Jamie Wolff, John Halley Gotway, Kathryn Fossell, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), and John Exby, NCAR

A frequent stumbling block when first running a modeling system is properly setting up and compiling all of the necessary code components, including a number of external libraries. In addition to running a forecast model, users often need pre- and post-processing software as well as a means to visualize and verify output from their model runs. To ease the burden of setting up a new system from the ground up, the concept of "containers" has quickly been gaining traction in the modeling community. Containers allow for end-to-end software systems to be bundled and provided to users, including the operating system, libraries, and code. This eliminates a myriad of technical issues frequently encountered when first spinning up on compiling all of the necessary components of numerical weather prediction systems (NWP). Containers also provide an avenue to run experiments using the same platform and code bases, naturally lending itself to easy sharing and comparing of results among collaborating groups, and enables the ability to reproduce results.

NCAR colleagues have established containers to run a subset of an end-to-end NWP system, including the WRF Pre-Processing System (WPS), Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, and the NCAR Command Language (NCL). To expand these capabilities and provide a complete containerized end-to-end NWP system, the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) has developed containers for the Unified Post-Processor (UPP) and the Model Evaluation Tools (MET) software systems, and combined them with the existing containers into one workflow. In addition, datasets for two cases (Hurricane Sandy and the June 2012 derecho event) have been bundled in containers to maximize ease of use. Establishing these additional containers lowers the barrier to entry to run NWP systems and evaluate the output; it also allows the DTC to further assist the user community, especially students, with efficiently running NWP components. This presentation will outline the motivation behind containers as well as step through the containers provided by the DTC.