ACADEMIA

SPECIAL COVERAGE FROM ISC2006 -- NCAR ports WRF model to a cluster of AMD Opteron-processor-based systems using PGI compilers and tools for 64-bit Windows. The Portland Group (PGI), a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, today announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research has ported its widely-used meteorological Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model to Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 using PGI's suite of high-performance parallelizing 64-bit Fortran compilers and tools. A prototype 64-bit version of WRF is being demonstrated this week in the Microsoft booth here at the 2006 International Supercomputer Conference. The WRF project is an ongoing collaboration by several institutions to develop a next-generation regional forecast model and data assimilation system for operational numerical weather prediction and atmospheric research. The WRF model has been developed over the past several years and is supported on a variety of platforms using variants of the UNIX operating system. Testing towards operational implementation of WRF is in its final stages at the U.S. National Weather Service, the U.S. Air Force Weather Agency, and a number of national forecast centers in other countries. The WRF model is freely distributed to the atmospheric science community and has more than 3,000 registered users across a range of research organizations, universities and commercial users worldwide (its Web site. A project to port WRF to a Windows Server 2003 x64 cluster was undertaken following discussions between National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Microsoft, AMD, and PGI during the Supercomputing 2005 conference in November, 2005. Under this project, a prototype version of WRF was developed and demonstrated running in parallel on a cluster of AMD Opteron-processor-based systems at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado using the PGI Workstation 6.1 Fortran compilers and tools from The Portland Group. The WRF model Version 2.1.2 software distribution comprises about 360,000 lines of source code. Of this total, fewer than 750 lines of code required modification in order to create an operational version of WRF on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 using the PGI compilers and tools. "In general, while certain issues remain, it is impressive to see that with a relatively small number of changes limited mostly to the WRF build mechanism, the PGI compilers and the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 together provided an environment that facilitated the transition of a large, existing UNIX HPC application such as WRF to the Microsoft Windows x64 environment," said John Michalakes, lead WRF software developer, National Center for Atmospheric Research. "This is a powerful first step in the migration of several important research-community applications to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 clusters," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "We aim to enable our customers to build, maintain, and use research-community applications like WRF seamlessly across multiple platforms. This port and demonstration show the relative ease with which this is now possible." "Scientific applications are moving to the world of 64-bit computing, and The Portland Group played an important role in helping NCAR port the Weather Research and Forecast model to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003," said Kyril Faenov, director of high-performance computing at Microsoft Corp. "Now NCAR's collaborators within research labs, commercial weather forecasting companies and academic institutions who use Windows-based workstations can easily run WRF on HPC clusters with Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003." "AMD64 technology is at the core of many of the world's most powerful computers. Working in conjunction with partners like PGI and Microsoft, we are creating a powerful yet manageable platform with the processor, operating system, and tools technology to solve increasingly complex problems," said Terri L. Hall, vice president, software alliances, AMD. "AMD is pleased to be supporting the WRF project to develop a next-generation regional forecast model." Complete information on the PGI compilers and tools and the preview edition of PGI Visual Fortran for Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is available from The Portland Group web site at its web site.