https://doi.org/10.25923/p0xe-mz37

Phase-2 of the Advanced Computing Evaluation Committee (AVEC) was formed in the Fall of 2015 to evaluate HPC performance, suitability and readiness to inform final selection of a new non-hydrostatic, dynamical core to meet National Weather Service’s operational forecast requirements for Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS). The two dycores evaluated were NOAA/GFDL’s FV3 and NCAR’s MPAS, finalists from the Phase-1 NGGPS dycore evaluation. This report describes methodology, cases, model configurations, and results of benchmarks conducted during dedicated access to Cori, a 52-thousand processor core supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)1 . AVEC’s testing addressed Criteria #4 and #5 in the NGGPS Test Plan: computational performance with then-current operational GFS physics, and computational efficiency of variable resolution and/or nesting capabilities of the two models. The dynamical cores’ software implementations were also evaluated for suitability on next-generation HPC architectures (Criterion #10)

National Weather Service (NWS)