1 Monday, 26 October 2015 © Crown copyright Met Office Computing Update Paul Selwood, Met Office

No Slide TitleRelocation : Exeter 2003
In 2003 we are relocating our HQ to Exeter. Move was forced by our current HQ buildings reaching the end of their useful life, and problems with retaining the right staff in the expensive South East.
Exeter will see a brand new, purpose built HQ to take us into the 21st century. Living in the South West will bring a better standard of living for our staff, more affordable housing, and is generally a much more relaxing place to live and work. London is a little over 2 hours away by train, and the M5 give good access to the UK motorway network. Exeter also has its own internation airport.
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~500 staff already working in Exeter
1 T3E, 1 mainframe, 30 NEC nodes, many servers already moved
1 T3E + mass storage system moving now.
Completion due end November 2003.
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Major Applications
Unified Model
Submodels (atmosphere, ocean …)
Variational Assimilation
Six hour time window
Increase in satellite observations
2003 (Exeter site)
6x current capability
12.5x current capability
Initial focus has been the porting of operational codes.
Basic port completed for all with no major issues encountered (some minor ones…)
Much easier than C90 to T3E!
Trial suite being assembled for parallel running from October.
Porting system very stable (4 months without reboot!)
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Memory
Typically 0.5% lines of code inserted, deleted or changed.
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Operational
Packing vectorises poorly
Packed data sizes too small to utilise best I/O connections
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Can run operationally with just 1 node for current resolutions
Better scalability has been observed for higher resolutions
Machine
#PEs
Satellite data volumes
Increase resolutions of models