What is your role in ESiWACE?
I co-lead work package 2, which has the title "Establish, evaluate and watch new technologies for the community". I am particularly involved in the Domain-specific language (DSL) part of this work package where two DSLs, PSyclone and Dawn, are being extended and evaluated for use with weather and climate models on Exascale architectures. I am working on extending the PSyclone DSL to demonstrate its use in the NEMO ocean and LFRic atmosphere models. I am also working on evaluating the potential of interoperability between PSyclone and Dawn.
What do you appreciate most about your work?
I really enjoy working in the fast changing-world of High Performance Computing. There is always something new to learn and new problems to solve. Having a long-standing collaboration with the Met Office has allowed me to try to solve some of these problems on key weather and climate models in collaboration with some of the brightest people in the world.
Which question in climate and weather research interests you the most?
Weather and Climate models are very large and complex pieces of software that are used by multiple institutions. The models tend to be used for decades and are typically under constant development by many people. As a result these models need to be maintainable and extensible. At the same time these models need to run efficiently on the world's most powerful supercomputers. This is difficult as hardware and the associated parallelisation technologies are fast changing and are increasingly diverse.
What drives you and what do you want to achieve?
In general I enjoy learning new things and developing solutions to problems that are useful to others. I would consider it an achievement if the PSyclone software that I am currently working on were used operationally by the Met Office and their partners. This would hopefully benefit a large number of people and add weight to the potential of using DSLs in Weather and Climate models.
Rupert Ford
Computational Scientist
Hartree Centre | Science and Technology Facilities Council
e-mail: rupert.ford@stfc.ac.uk