WRF on the Cloud

LADCO is seeking to understand the best practices for submitting and managing multiprocessor computing jobs on a cloud computing platform. In particular, LADCO would like to develop a WRF production environment that utilizes cloud-based computing. The goal of this project is to prototype a WRF production environment on a public, on-demand high performance computing service in the cloud to create a WRF platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution. The WRF PaaS must meet the following objectives:

• Configurable computing and storage to scale, as needed, to meet that needs of different WRF applications
• Configurable WRF options to enable changing grids, simulation periods, physics options, and input data
• Flexible cloud deployment from a command line interface to initiate computing clusters and spawn WRF jobs in the cloud

Call Notes

• WRF Benchmarking (emulating WRF 2016 12/4/1.3 grids) costing for CPUs, RAM and Storage
• CPU: 8 Cores: 5.5 day run = 4 days; 24 Cores: 3 days
• RAM: ~22 Gb RAM/run (2.5 Gb/core)
• Storage: test netCDF4 and netCDF no compression; with compression saves a lot of space (1/3 of the output) relative to uncompressed NCF (~70% compression); need to link in the HDF and NC4 libraries with compression to downstream programs; estimate about 5.8 Tb for the year, goes to 16.9 without compression

Costing analysis

• Cluster management would launch a head node and compute nodes
• 77 chunks, 20 computers for 16 days
• Head node running constantly
• Compute nodes running over the length of project
• Can probably use 80 computers 4 days insteady of 20 in 16 days
• Memory optimized machines performed better than compute optimized for CAMx
• Storage
  • Don't want to use local because it will need to be moved/migrated
  • Put the data on a storage appliance (S3) while running, and then push off to longer term storage
  • Glacier is archived and need to submit access through the console, response times listed as 1-5 minutes
• Storage (Azure)
  • Fast and slower lake storage for offline
  • Managed disks for online
• Transfer (estimate based on 5.8 Gb)
  • Internet transfer will cost ~ $928 for 5.5 Gb
  • Snowball 10 days to get data off a disk, costs $200 for entire WRF run (smallest was 50 Tb)
• Transfer Azure
  • Online transfer
  • Databox option (like snowball)