Overview of O2R and R2D Activities at JCSDA and NESDIS. S4 and JIBB Upgrades Status

JCSDA's operations to research (O2R) efforts are currently ongoing to have operational systems ported in a research environment. The current focus is in parallel testing prior to operational implementation in early November 2014 comprising of Global Forecast System (GFS) at triangular truncation 1534 (T1534, ~13 km) Semi-Lagrangian (SL) model, Grid point Statistical Interpolation (GSI) analysis at T574 and 80-member ENKF at T574 resolution available on the NESDIS-University of Wisconsin supported supercomputer - the existing (S4-Badger) and upgraded computing environments S4-Cardinal and JIBB. In conjunction with the high resolution model, for the purpose of research and development (R & D), a low resolution R & D version of the NCEP's 2014 GDAS system at T670 resolution of the GFS (SL), GSI (T254) and ENKF (T254) systems is being benchmarked for the JCSDA users to perform multiple experiments on JCSDA O2R environment.

A major expansion to the supercomputer S4 under the NOAA Sandy Supplemental Grant was completed in late July 2014 and the system is now available to researchers. The S4 expansion entailed an addition of a new S4 system called S4-Cardinal with 1,600 Intel E5-2680v2 2.8GHz compute cores, ~1050 TB disk storage with 180 scratch disks (2TB disks) and infiniband FDR-10 (40 Gbps) for networking in addition to S4 – Badger. The upgrade will initially result in two separate systems for ease of continuing operations and in the immediate future we will begin working on merging the two systems into a single system.

JCSDA's supercomputer JIBB based at NASA/GSFC also went through an expansion in March 2014. This includes the Intel Xeon Chip Sandy Bridge X5660 2.80 GHz, with 332.8 GFLOPs/node), 20.8 GFLOPS/core, 1,920 compute cores (120 nodes, 16 cores/node), 7.68 memory TiB (4 GiB Mem/node), 2.6 clock rate GHz and FSB or Mem I/O of 3x1066 MHZ with ~39.9 TFLOPs. The total number of JIBB compute cores is 5,376 (408 nodes), with 14.59 Memory TiB and ~78.6 TFLOP.

In addition to the GDAS system, JCSDA also supports other operational systems including the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF), regional North American Mesoscale (NAM) with the NAM Data Assimilation System (NDAS), Hybrid Co-ordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) and Land Information System (LIS) models. The JCSDA research to demonstration (R2D) to R2O conduit mainly will involve a comprehensive end-to-end assessment of the input satellite data to the GSI, an objective analysis of the outputs from the GDAS/NDAS/HWRF assimilation and GFS/NAM/HWRF forecast experiments using a complete Independent Assessment Tools (IAT) package. NAM 2014 and HWRF 2014 versions will be ported on to S4/JIBB as soon as the GDAS testing is completed.