Inspur builds high-performance meteorological computing system

“Every time we come to a holiday, our work will always be extremely stressful and busy.” The staff of Shandong Meteorological Bureau said. Just after the Lunar New Year, the average person feels reunion and celebration, and meteorologists will feel different tensions. How to do a good job in meteorological service during the Spring Festival is an important task for meteorological units in all provinces and cities. There are more extreme weather events and more frequent weather changes in Shandong Province. In addition, Shandong Province also plays an important role in China's energy, precious metals, food, and marine strategy. Therefore, weather forecasting is particularly important for the economic development of Shandong Province.

The climate is changing rapidly and the forecast is very difficult

The Shandong Provincial Meteorological Bureau, as the backbone department of meteorological management in the province, shoulders important responsibilities in the new environment, including the production and publication of provincial short- and medium-term weather forecasts, short-term near-term weather forecasts, lightning weather warnings, atmospheric composition forecasts, and severe weather warnings. And so on, and assume the province's weather, atmospheric composition and other aspects of technology development and application research and survey for the provincial leadership to provide advice.

In order to provide accurate and reliable meteorological forecast data, the construction and application requirements of high-performance computing systems of the Shandong Meteorological Bureau are urgent. In general, the weather forecasting process can be divided into four major parts, of which the third part, model operation, is an important part of the forecasting process. WRF is one of the most widely used operating modes. It has characteristics such as large amount of calculation, communication intensive, high I/O requirements, and standardized systematic integration. It has high performance for high-performance computing systems. Requirements, specific requirements are as follows:

Large amount of calculation: weather forecast itself has timeliness, requiring regular fixed-point operation, without manual intervention. Normally, it runs every day for a fixed period of 2-4 hours and runs within 2 hours of each time period. Therefore, parallel computing must be performed using a high-performance computing system with excellent computing performance.

Communication intensive: Due to parallel computing, the communication between CPUs is very large. This is mainly reflected in the communication between the various WRF computing domains and the communication between various data divisions. Therefore, this high-performance computing system is required to have both high-performance computing and a high-performance communication network.

High I/O requirements: Because of the large number of users involved and a large number of small file reads and writes, the meteorological model has high requirements on the IOPS performance of the entire system. The stability and availability of the storage system are critical to the operation of the entire business system. The storage system has a fault self-healing function. In addition, considering the periodic access characteristics of weather data, it is necessary to support hierarchical storage based on policies.

Mode system integration: From the software processing point of view, it is generally divided into pre-processing, main mode and post-processing. The entire model system from the pre-processing to the main mode to the post-processing requires the system to have a high degree of robustness. Therefore, excellent mode software application expert support and hardware-level system technical support are the key to the good use of the forecast mode.

In summary, in order to meet the current business needs of Shandong Meteorological Bureau and future business development requirements, it is imperative to build a new high-performance computing system.

Inspur high-performance computing system provides the basis for meteorological bureau to master the changing situation

In order to achieve accurate and effective high-performance computing applications, Shandong Provincial Meteorological Bureau has repeatedly consulted and investigated the advanced units of high-performance computing applications in the same industry, and finally selected Inspur high-performance system solutions.

Inspur has the HPC support team in the field of numerical forecasting in the most systematic and specialized level in China, and many high-performance computing success stories in the field of numerical forecasting. Inspur combines the characteristics of the industry and starts from applications. The proposed solution is not only extremely targeted but also has There are many advantages as follows:

Computing node: Inspur solution uses high-performance Intel Xeon E5 series processors, and the computing node adopts dual-channel computing node Inspur NF5270M3 and four-way computing node Inspur NF8420M3 mashup scheme, in which a large number of dual-channel computing nodes match WRF characteristics, and WRF can be used. The parallelism of the model is at its best. The four-way computing node relies on its outstanding computing power and memory capacity to complete the analysis of small and medium mode processing on one machine, reducing the time for data preprocessing, calculation, and analysis, and improving the computational efficiency.

High-speed network: A high-performance dedicated high-speed IB network is used to interconnect the full-line speed of the computing node, management node, and login node, ensuring the high performance of the cluster communication network. NAS storage is connected to a high-speed network through 10 Gigabit, and with the clustered parallel file system, all nodes share data.

Storage system: Inspur integrated previous storage hardware solutions, system applications require the features of storage devices, and Inspur's experience in high-performance computing for many years, using the Inspur Group State Key Laboratory of High-Efficiency Servers and Storage Technologies. The customized Tstor storage system fully satisfies the user's current use and future expansion needs.

Low power consumption: Inspur solution not only emphasizes the overall operation efficiency, but also emphasizes the computational power per unit volume and the computing power that the unit energy consumption can provide. The servers of this project are all based on Inspur Core Technology, which can realize real-time monitoring and upper limit control of system power consumption, intelligently adjust power consumption and fan speed according to the actual load of the system, and greatly reduce system power consumption.

Extensible: The computing system adopts Inspur rack server, which not only guarantees the scalability within the node, but also guarantees the horizontal scalability of the entire cluster. In general, it meets the user's demand for future cluster expansion.

In addition, Inspur also uses the Cluster Engine cluster to monitor and manage the entire system, providing cluster deployment, monitoring, alarms, management, statistics, reporting, and job scheduling. The deployment plan of integrated software and hardware improves the availability and stability of the entire high-performance cluster system, and simplifies the workload and work difficulty of Shandong Meteorological Bureau staff. Inspur also formed an application development team with the Shandong Meteorological Bureau to jointly conduct research and development of high-performance computing in the meteorological field, especially in the direction of optimization of application software related to mesoscale weather forecasting.

After the high-performance system was put into use, the meteorological operation efficiency of the Shandong Meteorological Bureau increased significantly. This will provide a strong impetus for the forecasting time accuracy and regional accuracy of the Shandong Meteorological Bureau. It is a severe weather warning and hydrometeorology in Shandong Province. Analysis, climate research, etc. provide powerful calculation support to realize the goal of “take precautions” faster.

According to the relevant person in charge of the Shandong Meteorological Bureau, “The performance of the high-performance computing system built by Inspur is very good in terms of actual operation, and it can fully meet the computational needs of the mesoscale numerical model”.