Author: Kris Booker
EPIC Team: Platform Product Owner
Kris Booker from the EPIC Platform team collaborated with Ben Cash from George Mason University (GMU) to test a proof of concept for running the UFS weather model on academic high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. This project aims to address one of the many challenges in the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community, which is the barrier to entry caused by complex program library requirements in multiuser academic HPC environments.
By establishing an account on the Frontera platform, Kris and Ben explored alternative approaches to these challenges. Traditional solutions like spack-stack often require administrative rights and can be difficult for less experienced users. They used Apptainer (formerly Singularity) to overcome these issues, which is a tool that allows running containers without needing administrative privileges, making it more suitable for academic HPC settings.
Using a non-privileged user account, Kris successfully built the UFS model within an Apptainer container on Frontera. The key was using a prebuilt container provided by NOAA EPIC that included all necessary dependencies, such as the spack-stack version 1.6 libraries. This method simplified the process significantly, as all library dependencies were met within the container and bypassed the complexities of the HPC system’s OS layer.
While this project is still in its preliminary stages, it is important to note that different HPC environments may require specific applications to be installed for this approach to work, and not all systems may support Apptainer. EPIC, GMU, and their UFS partners are continuing to refine this process and address these challenges.
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If you have any questions, contact us at support.epic@noaa.gov or provide us with your success stories.
Stay tuned for more updates on this exciting development in our next newsletter!
