UAE National Meteorology Center optimizes weather forecasting with new supercomputer from Hewlett Packard Enterprise

2021: Creating a supercomputer

On November 1, 2021, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced the creation of a supercomputer for the UAE National Center for Meteorology, designed to optimize weather forecasting and general climate research.

According to the company, the Center's supercomputer called Atmosphere was created using HPE Cray EX Supercomputer, a comprehensive platform for high-performance computing with liquid cooling, which was specially designed to provide performance and combines the power of AMD EPYC 2nd generation processors and NVIDIA A100 graphics accelerators, software, data storage and network. The combination of technologies allowed the Center's researchers to optimize the possibilities of simultaneously applying modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence and deep learning to process complex data, increase the accuracy and speed of forecasting weather events.

HPE supercomputers provide most of the world's weather forecasting needs, whether it is increasing the predictability of hurricanes reaching land or predicting the spread and effects of forest fires. Global organizations, such as the National Center for Meteorology (NCM), use supercomputer power to obtain insights about weather and climate, which are crucial for decision-making and regional and national security. We are honored to be selected by NCM to create the Atmosphere supercomputer, equipped with comprehensive high-performance computing solutions and designed to provide real-time information analysis for the UAE. stated Bill Mannel, Vice President and CEO of HPC at HPE

The Centre uses numerical modelling software to support the UAE's current meteorological forecast needs. These are, in particular, Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO) systems, which use models of physics and dynamics of the atmosphere and ocean to model and predict weather conditions. With an Atmosphere supercomputer with higher performance than the existing Center system, the run time of simulations running using these models will be reduced to 200% for WRF and up to 300% for COSMO. This will reduce the analysis time to obtain a forecast. The UAE National Meteorology Centre conducts such real-time weather modelling for a number of UAE national and regional services, including:

• Aviation safety, for example, to assist pilots during take-off and landing at airports. This is possible thanks to the work of more than 100 24-hour meteorological monitoring stations in the UAE, which provide weather forecasts, provide meteorological data and warn of worsening weather conditions, including strong winds, rain and turbulence.
• Preparing for tropical storms. Such phenomena can be predicted by simulating atmospheric activity based on information (patterns) about previous storm phenomena supplemented by artificial intelligence capabilities.

At the National Meteorology Centre, we aim to carry out weather forecasting to provide real-time forecasts and storm warnings, thereby informing local authorities and UAE residents of weather conditions and, more importantly, helping to ensure the safety of citizens. We are also working on a deeper understanding of climate and its complex features, as well as the development of technologies that optimize sustainability. As part of the creation of Atmosphere, we collaborated with HPE to design a significantly more productive supercomputer with targeted modeling and simulation capabilities using artificial intelligence to accelerate the study of weather and climate and generally develop common research and development in our country. Thanks to the installation of this modern supercomputer, the UAE has become a country in which a powerful liquid-cooled system based on the HPE Cray EX for national meteorological centers in the Middle East and Africa is installed. noted Dr. Abdullah Al Mandus, Director of the National Meteorology Centre and President of the World Meteorological Organization Regional Association II (Asia)

The NCM Atmosphere supercomputer is based on two HPE Cray EX Supercomputer cabinets, which are HPC systems specially designed for scalable performance from Peta- to Exa-flop. Atmosphere delivers higher performance with a theoretical maximum performance of 2.8 Petaflops while increasing energy efficiency with HPE Cray EX Supercomputer liquid cooling capabilities.

In addition, during the development and construction stages of the supercomputer, Atmosphere HPE has integrated the following end-to-end technologies for high-performance computing:

• Calculators became available to the optimization of modeling, simulations and other working processes demanding processing of large volume of data thanks to to processors AMD EPYC of the 2nd generation;
• AI technologies for large amounts of data and images using NVIDIA A100 graphics accelerators;
• Faster congestion control (congestion) for large-scale workloads that require large amounts of data and artificial intelligence workloads with HPE Slingshot, an Ethernet-compatible network designed for high-performance computing and AI;
• The optimized storage for support and joint access to the difficult workloads connected with simulation, modeling and AI is reached at the expense of the Cray ClusterStor E1000 system from HPE and HPE Data Management Framework;
• Detailed centralized monitoring and management to achieve optimal performance based on HPE Performance Cluster Manager, HPC management solutions, and a fully integrated suite of HPC and AI optimization software based on HPE Cray Programming Environment.