WRF on NERSC systems¶
Introduction¶
The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is a numerical model for the atmosphere and widely used in research projects, including those funded by the DOE Office of Science.
WRF is very flexible in terms of scientific and computational configurations. The model can be configured to simulate a broad range of atmospheric processes from boundary-layer turbulence to global-scale circulations, and from a small domain on a single node to a large domain using 10s and 100s of nodes (1000s of cpus) of the NERSC system.
WRF Pre-Processing System (WPS) is a suite of programs to produce the initial and boundary conditions for WRF simulations.
The model has been developed through a collaboration of several organizations and user community. The source code is maintained in Github by the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
A WRF model user needs to download and compile the WRF and WPS source codes to use them on the NERSC systems (i.e., the WRF model system is not provided as a pre-compiled module).
Download WRF releases from here
Download WPS releases from here
Documentation and general support for the WRF model are provided by MMM and the user community through the following websites:
We highly recommend going through the FAQ page in the support forum. They cover more than 100 topics that have been often asked by WRF users, for example how to choose appropriate number of MPI ranks for a given grid, and common reasons for a segmentation fault.
WRF Special Interest Group (WRF-SIG) at NERSC¶
WRF-SIG is a group of WRF users at NERSC. We have quasi-regular meetings at every few months to exchange information and learn technical and scientific issues related to the WRF model and NERSC systems. The members will have access to the shared data directory and support tickets issued by other members to be aware of on-going technical issues for WRF at NERSC.
Various WRF topics are discussed in WRF-SIG meetings. An interesting topic in a recent meeting is about an effort by a team to offload parts of the computationally expensive Fast Spectral Bin Microphysics (FSBM) routine to GPUs using OpenMP, which is summarized in a poster.
Please join the group through this google form and also subscribe to the Slack channel (it is required to first join the NERSC Users Slack workspace).
Contents¶
Note
The build and run instructions may change as the software environment at NERSC changes.
WRF benchmark on NERSC systems