Development of the NCEPLIBS Umbrella to Service the Operational Modeling and Community Research

The NCEPLIBS developed and maintained in National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) is a collection of software libraries and utilities, both internally and externally developed, that support research development and operational production of National Weather Service numerical predictions. The NCEPLIBS library and utility components service the entire NCEP modeling suite, including the more than 70 applications that compose the future operational modeling system FV3GFS. The demand of each application differs in code functions, data format and compiler versions etc, which the traditional master/trunk version control/service is difficult to handle. Therefore, the NCEPLIBS umbrella system is developed to service various application requests and facilitate the operational modeling and community research.

The NCEPLIBS umbrella is software tool for application of NCEPLIBS components based in the NOAA VLAB system that consider internal and public access authorizations. This tool manages retrieving, compiling and installing required components from the NCEPLIBS repository and their externals so users have a complete set of source files for their applications. This tool also creates unix modules used for building applications based on machine configurations. NCEPLIBS repository is composed of a number of different components that are developed and managed independently. Each component may have different optional versions or additional 'external' dependencies that are also developed and managed independently. The NCEPLIBS umbrella starts from setting the appropriate versions of target components based on the demand of users, and then setting the local compiler options and environment variables for compiling/installation. Once it is implemented, the requested code will be automatically retrieved and installed on the requested directory.