Abstract:
Weather is borderless and each national weather service is challenged in providing the best possible forecasting product for its society. As a precursor to a joint nordic effort on supercomputing and numerical weather prediction have DMI and IMO recently entered into a partnership, where IMO is hosting the DMI supercomputer facility, in return of which will DMI on its supercomputer operate a numerical weather forecast model relevant to forecasting obligations of IMO.
The partnership between DMI and IMO also grew from IMO and Iceland being obvious partners to DMI. This with Iceland having perfect climate for data centers and with an abundance of green fossil free energy and with IMO being the same type of organization as DMI, therefore by nature fully understanding and supportive of the specific production needs and requirements, which are characteristic for a national meteorological service. Further to this is network connectivity between Denmark and Iceland as realized by the national research networks and NorduNet both capable and redundant. This lays a solid basis for operating the DMI supercomputer from remote with IMO taking good care of the installation and supportive infrastructure.
The presentation will introduce why weather services needs access to state of the art supercomputers for fulfilling their mission. An overview will be given of the building blocks and supportive infrastructure prerequisites of the DMI supercomputer, which was installed at IMO premises autumn 2015. With this will the day-to-day practicalities of operating the supercomputer be outlined, showing the roles and obligations of DMI and IMO in their partnership plus the roles of equally important third party service providers, among those the national research networks. Finally will be given a broader perspective viewpoint on partnering across borders and nations.