Petascale WRF simulation of hurricane sandy: Deployment of NCSA's cray XE6 blue waters

Abstract

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model has been employed on the largest yet storm prediction model using real data of over 4 billion points to simulate the landfall of Hurricane Sandy. Using an unprecedented 13,680 nodes (437,760 cores) of the Cray XE6 “Blue Waters” at NCSA at the University of Illinois, researchers achieved a sustained rate of 285 Tflops while simulating an 18-hour forecast. A grid of size 9120×9216×48 (1.4Tbytes of input) was used, with horizontal resolution of 500 meters and a 2-second time step. 86 Gbytes of forecast data was written every 6 forecast hours at a rate of up to 2 Gbytes/second and collaboratively post-processed and displayed using the Vapor suite at NCAR. Opportunities to enhance scalability in the source code, run-time, and operating system realms were exploited. The output of this numerical model is now under study for model validation.