HPC Considerations for NOAA's Next Generation Global Prediction System

NOAA's project to design, develop, and implement Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) to run operationally by 2020 has entered the second phase of testing that includes evaluation and testing of two candidate models performance on current high-performance computing systems as well as readiness for successive generations of HPC systems over the 10 to 15 year NGGPS life span. The primary emphasis will be on HPC architectures with roadmaps that offer the best trade-off of migration cost to performance reward, and that use industry standard, mature, and widely supported programming models. At the same time, we are monitoring developments in other technology tracks such as GPGPU as well as other potentially game changing technologies, the newest of which are the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) with inexact/reduced precision computing.