High-Performance Supercontainers Show Promise for Earth System Prediction

Using a NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) supercomputer and other high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, the multi-agency Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) successfully demonstrated software “supercontainers” for its next-generation Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) system.

Demonstration results were presented at the virtual 101st Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS 101) on January 14, 2021 by Mark Miesch, JEDI core team member and software engineer with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

Software containers are encapsulated user environments that contain everything needed to run an application. They are portable across computing systems ranging from laptops to cloud to HPC; supercontainers can run across multiple HPC nodes. Other container benefits include reproducibility, version control, efficiency, and getting new users up and running quickly.

“Making the JEDI software widely available through the supercontainer to the user and developer community is strategically important,” said Tsengdar Lee, NASA High-End Computing Program Manager and ex-officio JCSDA Management Oversight Board member. “It enables the NASA and NOAA Earth system modeling centers to lower the barrier to entry and greatly democratize the sophisticated satellite data assimilation software for community-based open science projects.”

Read the article here:
www.nccs.nasa.gov/news-events/nccs-highlights/Supercontainers