87th AMS Annual Meeting

Thursday, 18 January 2007: 9:00 AM
Siege: a graphical user interface to enable management of large numbers of weather simulations
216AB (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
Jay Alameda, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Champaign, IL; and B. F. Jewett, R. B. Wilhelmson, A. Rossi, S. Hampton, T. Baltzer, and A. Wilson
Poster PDF (118.4 kB)
In the LEAD project, we have focused on the most challenging users of numerical weather prediction, namely, the atmospheric science researchers, who are prone to use their own tools, their own modified versions of community codes such as the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, and are typically comfortable with elaborate shell scripts to perform the work they find to be necessary to succeed, to drive our development efforts. We will describe our graphical user interface, Siege, which we can adapt to a multiplicity of user scenarios, and is coupled to a multi-level workflow engine, to handle both the challenges of ensemble description and execution, as well as the detailed patterns of workflow on each computational resource; services to support the peculiarities of each platform being used to do the modeling (such as on TeraGrid), and the use of an RDF triple store and message bus together as the backbone of our notification, logging, and metadata infrastructure. The design of our ensemble management software and services attempts to come to grips with lack of control of elements surrounding and supporting the environment; we achieve this through multiple mechanisms including using the OSGI plug-in architecture, as well as the use of RDF triples as our finest-grain descriptive element. This combination, we believe, is an important stepping stone to building a cyberenvironment, which aims to provides flexibility and ease of use far beyond the current range of typical problem solving environments.

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