Individuals from the University of Reading Departments of Meteorology and Computer Science contribute to ESiWACE. Both departments are part of the School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences (SMPCS) - one of the largest and most successful clusters of mathematical and computational sciences departments in the UK. It is home to more than 300 staff, including over 90 core academic staff and over 100 research staff, and to more than 1000 students across the undergraduate, master's and PhD programmes.
ESiWACE contributors from UREAD are based in the Advanced Computing for Environmental Sciences (ACES) computer science research group and/or the Computational Modelling Services group of the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science, NCAS (NCAS-CMS).
The NCAS-CMS group at Reading provides support for the U.K. academic community on a wide range of climate and earth-system models and tools on several supercomputer platforms. The scope of support provided is wide ranging, covering areas as diverse as data standards, code management; model performance optimisation; access to and management of high-performance compute and data services. It also carries out research and development, with several of the (November 2021) 18 staff funded on research projects ranging from next generation models to data management and visualisation tools. NCAS-CMS has strong links with the UK Met Office and works closely with them on many aspects of model infrastructure development and deployment.
Role in the project
UREAD is leading on the development of tools for
1. managing data production in simulation workflows from individual model runs to ensembles, and
2. providing simple semantic interfaces to help manage data movement between storage tiers on-site and between sites.
Names of the colleagues involved
Prof. Bryan Lawrence, Dr Grenville Lister and other CMS and ACES staff as necessary.
Relevant infrastructure and services available for climate & weather
NCAS-CMS manage much of the HPC climate modelling infrastructure and resource allocation on National HPC Services (ARCHER2 and JASMIN) for the UK academic community, through model installation, support, optimisation, provision of end-to-end numerical modelling project services.
NCAS-CMS develops and maintain software for use in data processing, data analysis, and data visualisation and delivers bi-annual training for the UK Met Office Unified Model and related software tools and utilities.