EPIC’s 7 Investment Areas
In early 2019, an ensemble of NOAA experts in numerical modeling and research to operations (R2O) came together to outline EPIC’s Vision. They identified the following seven priority investment areas as crucial to EPIC’s success.
External Engagement and Community
Engagement is the opportunity to share and learn from each other. EPIC will facilitate:
- Knowledge sharing (e.g. annual meetings, seminar series, summer institutes, code sprints)
- Partnerships (with industry, academia, and visiting scientists and modelers)
- Competitions (e.g. hack-a-thons, grant funding opportunities)
- Communication between stakeholders
Software and Performance Engineering
Aligning software engineers with researchers and modelers is essential to EPIC’s Mission. This alignment will produce well-documented, cloud-friendly, performance-optimized code and will free scientists to perform research and development. Projects in this category include management and documentation of code, integration with other NOAA and community modeling efforts, and performance optimization. These projects will be accomplished through coordination with and between researchers and will take advantage of new computational technologies.
Software Infrastructure
The community development environment depends upon accessibility, reliability, and security, among other factors. Software infrastructure will include work on the user management system, user interface, data storage, repository, and coupling of components.
User-Support Services
Teams will staff a central communication forum and update the frequently-asked questions page. This service will ensure access and usability by all community members, regardless of their level of expertise. The activities in this category will include technical assistance, documentation updates, code evaluation, trainings, and workshops.
Cloud-Based High-Performance Computing
NOAA will transition research and development to a cloud environment. This change has the potential to dramatically improve NOAA’s operational and research-related high-performance computing capacity, which, in turn, will contribute to the advancement of numerical weather prediction.
Scientific Innovation
EPIC exists to foster scientific innovation in numerical weather prediction. By employing the approaches envisioned, EPIC will (1) make the UFS the most accurate and innovative weather modeling system in the world, and (2) provide a transparent transition process for maturing innovations into operations.
Management and Planning
Investments in management and planning will provide leadership and administration for functions central to EPIC success. Firstly, these investments will provide the support required to build and sustain EPIC as a modern, community-developed model. They will also empower leadership to plan and manage the provision of services required to establish a stakeholder engagement process and to identify and sustain NOAA operational needs.
To learn more, read the EPIC Vision Paper.
