The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is one of seven research councils in the UK and is funded by UKRI, the UK's national funding agency investing in science and research. STFC is one of Europe’s largest multi-disciplinary research organisations and has considerable world-class research expertise in areas ranging from nanostructures to lasers, from particle physics to cosmology, from high performance computing and supercomputing to peta-scale data management.
STFC runs two, national laboratories which provide supercomputing and data-archival facilities for users nationwide. In addition to these facilities, STFC employs around 150 computational scientists who work to develop and optimise the full range of scientific applications as well as providing training in software engineering and optimisation.

Role in the project

STFC co-leads work package 2 "Establish, evaluate and watch new technologies for the community". In this work package we are mostly contributing to the Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) tasks in which DSLs are being evaluated for use in Exascale architectures. In particular we are developing the PSyclone DSL for use with the NEMO ocean model, improving PSyclone for the LFRic atmosphere model, evaluating the potential for interoperability between PSyclone and the Dawn DSL and comparing the performance between PSyclone, Dawn and hand-crafted solutions.

In work package 4 STFC is adding utilities to S3netCDF in order to make it more useful and usable for the wider modelling community, developing the nearline data-storage (NLDS) interface and evaluating and improving the performance of transferring data to JASMIN external cloud storage.

In the first project phase of ESiWACE, STFC investigated and optimised metadata management for climate data files and investigated the future of data storage for climate data, in collaboration with the project partners and the HDF group.

Names of the colleagues involved

Rupert Ford, Andrew Porter, Jack Leland and Neil Massey.

Relevant infrastructure and services available for climate & weather

STFC's Hartree centre operates "Scafell Pike", an Atos Sequana X1000 system consisting of 864 dual Intel Xeon nodes and 840 Xeon Phi nodes with a Mellanox EDR interconnect.

The STFC Rutherford Appleton laboratory hosts the JASMIN "super-data-cluster" on behalf of UKRI's Natural Environment Research Council. This machine supports the data-analysis requirements of the UK and European climate and earth-system modelling community. It consists of over 44 Petabytes of fast storage, co-located with computing facilities (11,500 cores) for data-analysis, with dedicated light paths to various key facilities and institutes within the UK.

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