Authors: Usama Anber (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), Paulo Souza (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
Abstract: Containers are a relatively new concept for weather and climate applications due to their immense complexity and infrastructure, platform, and environment dependencies. The accuracy of predictions made by these applications requires a collaborative effort from the scientific community in academia and national laboratories. However, the setup and configuration of these applications is not a straightforward task and often fails on different HPC architectures. In this paper, we show that containers offer a solution to this problem. We first demonstrate the containerization workflow of these applications, which facilitates portability and bursting out into the public cloud. We also demonstrate scalability and performance in comparison to the bare-metal version of the applications, which is another major concern to the weather and climate community.
Long Description: Containers are a relatively new concept for weather and climate applications due to their immense complexity and infrastructure, platform, and environment dependencies. The accuracy of predictions made by these applications requires a collaborative effort from the scientific community in academia and national laboratories. However, the setup and configuration of these applications is not a straightforward task and often fails on different HPC architectures. In this paper, we show that containers offer a solution to this problem. We first demonstrate the containerization workflow of these applications, which facilitates portability and bursting out into the public cloud. We also demonstrate scalability and performance in comparison to the bare-metal version of the applications, which is another major concern to the weather and climate community.