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Archive for the ‘MeteoSwiss’ Category

Interview at SC11 with Ulrich Schaettler of DWD

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Ulrich Schättler is working for Germany’s National Meteorological Service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). He started at DWD as software engineer. Years ago he has been asked to parallelize the weather forecast model on distributed memory computers. Since then he is getting involved in weather forecasting and operational forecasting. In his actual function he is responsible to produce day by day the weather forecasts and to give support to the users.

The model used by DWD is named COSMO and is the same being used in Switzerland and other countries in Europe and worldwide. COSMO has been developed in the late 90thies as a non hydrostatic regional model. COSMO is not only being used by weather services but also by the academia for research and to teach and train students . DWD and Ueli Schättler are also involved in the Swiss HP2C project aimed to port COSMO to next generation HPC platforms.

At this place we would also like to remember you about the Colloquium at MeteoSwiss on How much HPC does meteorology need? planned for tomorrow, Tuesday, November 29th.

CH2011 – CSCS Supercomputers Compute Climate Scenarios for Switzerland

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011

It is getting warmer in Switzerland and dryer in summer, and climate change will also affect the frequency and character of extreme events.

Climate scientists of C2SM Competence Centre (Center for Climate Systems Modeling) and MeteoSwiss have generated the Swiss Climate Change Scenarios CH2011 which provide a new assessment of how climate may change over the 21st century in Switzerland. They are based on new generations of climate models with higher resolution, improved statistical methods, and an account of all recent relevant studies as well as the assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The necessary HPC infrastructure has been provided by CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre on Cray supercomputers.

Read the interview with Climate scientist Christoph Schär prividing information about the current climate scenarios in Switzerland and the role of CSCS and supercomputing for climate research »

Press release by MeteoSwiss »

Panel on Experience of Using HPC in Meteorology and RAPS Forum

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Some weeks ago we published a conference report from the 14th ECMWF workshop on HPC in Meteorology. At the end of the workshop ECMWF organized a panel discussing the experience of using HPC in meteorology.

A paper resuming the results of the panel is now available and can be downloaded from the ECMWF website.

Web Forum RAPS (Real Applications for Parallel Systems)

A web forum has  been set up for the RAPS (Real Applications for Parallel Systems) community including attendees of the recent 14th ECMWF
workshop on HPC in Meteorology.

If you want to participate in the RAPS forum discussions you will have to register, to do this simply go to, http://raps.enes.org/ and click on register (in the top right hand corner), where you will be asked to provide some basic information (id/pw/email address) and submit your registration. Registration could take up to a day to process, after which time you will receive an email confirming that your account has been activated.

Once activated, click on the forums button where you will be invited to participate in any of the current forums that have been set up, and with a few initial posts already made.

The forums are,

  • Parallel I/O initiative
    This forum should be used for developing a project for a portable parallel I/O library for NWP and climate modeling
  • Measurement tools initiative
    Discuss the design and implementation of a common lightweight measurement tools library
  • Fortran 2003
    Debate about Fortran 2003 usage
  • Fortran 2008
    Debate about Fortran 2008 usage

Some background to these forums can be found at the ECMWF workshop website, for the recent 14th ECMWF Workshop on the Use of High Performance Computing in Meteorology, and in particular a write up of the final panel session.

CSCS/ETH Zurich and MeteoSwiss Common Presentation in Bern

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

The president of ETH Zurich, Prof. Ralph Eichler invited last Wednesday, June 16 the Swiss parliamentarian to join over lunch to an introduction of ETH Zurcih activities in High Performance Computing. Prof. Thomas Schulthess presented  the activities of CSCS and the different elements of the Swiss National Supercomputing strategy (HPCN). Dr. Peter Binder of MeteoSwiss explained why supercomputer are essential for meteorology (CSCS is running two supercomputers for MeteoSwiss for 72 hours weather forecasts). Dr. Alessandro Curioni of IBM Rüschlikon explained how fast HPC is developing and that it is essential to regularly invest in new HPC systems.

You may read a longer article (in German) on this common presentation on ETH Life »

Dr. Peter Binder of MeteoSwiss (next picture)

A short movie (in Italian, German and French) explaining the importance of HPC for science, industry and society has been especially been produced for this day.

In Italian (and for iPhone »):

In German YouTube » (and for iPhone »)
In French YouTube » (and for iPhone »)

Swiss Engineering STZ Reports on Weather Forecasts on Supercomputer at CSCS

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

The last issue of the Swiss Engineering STZ journal reports on how metereologists use modern supercomputer for weather forecasts. One article in particular reports on the collaboration between MeteoSwiss and CSCS to provide more accurate weather forecasts for Switzerland.

Link to the whole journal »
Link to the article on MeteoSwiss and CSSC »

The supercomputer used by MeteoSwiss for weather forecasts at CSCS is called Buin: