Towards energy efficient numerical weather prediction

Scalable algorithms and approaches

S. Janakiraman, Sandeep K. Joshi, and V. Venkatesh Shenoi

Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune – 411 008

The weather forecasting has a major impact on the society. The meteorologists have been using the
numerical weather prediction models for the operation forecast for over several decades ever since
Richardson's attempt towards numerical models for weather prediction. The weather codes have
consumed a good portion of the computational power available in several supercomputing centers.
This has led to the need to improve the computational efficiency of the codes/models to achieve
better resolution moving towards the better accuracy of the forecasts. However, these large scale
computations are possible only at the expense of the huge energy budget due to the increasing
requirement of computational resources as well as the cooling infrastructure required to maintain
them. But with the energy budget fixed at 20 MW it is even more challenging as we are compelled
to move towards energy efficiency of the weather codes. We focus towards the spectral transform
method as case study for this talk. This method has been in use in NCAR and ECMWF for the
operational forecasts.

In this talk, we shall discuss the basics of numerical weather predictions and move towards the test
bed shallow water model to be solved by spectral transform method. The highlights of the approach
with regard to algorithm, its scalability and improvements leading to the reduction in the
computational complexity will be discussed. To conclude, some of the recent efforts on scaling up
the solver for shallow water equations are discussed along with the glimpse of the ongoing efforts in
the ESCAPE project. This talk is inspired by our project proposal on “Scalable algorithmic
approach to spectral transform method” to be pursued under NSM, India.