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ALADIN
High Resolution Numerical Weather Prediction Project
Website of the ALADIN Consortium
Maintenance Training, Toulouse, 20-22 Sept 2010
Article published on 13 September 2010
last modification on 26 July 2011

by Patricia

The common software used for the global models IFS and Arpège and the LAM models Aladin, Alaro and Arome is used and developed jointly by ECMWF and by the members of the Aladin/Hirlam/Lace consortia.

Integrating contributions from such a large community of developpers within this common code is a great challenge. To this extent, regular periods of maintenance and validation of the code are needed before each cycle can be declared: the so-called phasing. It requires at the same time a good knowledge of the code and of the working environment necessary to carry out the merging and the validation of the contributions to the code coming from various developers.

From September 20 to 22th, a Maintenance Training was organized in Toulouse jointly by Météo-France and LACE. Its objectives were, among others, to help newcomers from the Aladin-LACE-Hirlam community to get familiar with the phasing procedure, to give them some overview of the code’s architecture and to explain the coding rules to be respected inside the common software.

At the end, 26 participants from 17 countries were welcomed in Toulouse and followed these 3 days of lectures and practical sessions under the supervision of 7 tutors from LACE and Météo-France.

For those who missed this training, all presentations and practical exercices are to be found on the dedicated pages on gmapdoc website as well than the summary of the final discussions.

 Participants


 Agenda

Monday September 20th

  • General presentation of phasing procedure: 9h-10h30
    • Welcoming of participants+ practical details Olivier 5 min
    • Objectives and generalities about phasing Claude 30 min
    • General description of phasing roadmap Claude 30 min
    • Presentation of GCO’s implication in the phasing and gestion of the code S.Martinez 15 min
  • Code issues 11h-12h
    • Description of the general architecture of the code K.Yessad 30 min
    • Description of different configurations Olivier 30 min
  • Code issues: 14h-18h
    • Preprocessing and format of observations for assimilation (Bator, Oulan...) Alena 45min
    • Organization of the time step K.Yessad 30 min
    • 3DVar – Patrick 1h
    • Coding norms and rules (actualized in the framework of OOPS) K.Yessad 30min
    • Development constraints (including presentation of constraints due to shared code with Arp/Ifs) Filip 30 min
    • OOPS and basis on object oriented programming Claude 30 min

Tuesday September 21th

  • Presentation of phasing tools 9-12h:
    • ClearCase (View history of modifications, creation of a new branch...) Olivier 20 min
    • Mitraillette validation’s tool (including experiment on yuki) Karim 30min
    • Execution and validation during phasing (DrHook, output files) Olda 45 min (1h)
    • Local Validation to the reference, OpenMP, optimization Filip 45min
    • Hirlam experiences on remote maintenance of the code ( Toon Moene ) 30 min
  • Pratical exercices 13h30-18h:
    • Phasing exercices (including use of clearcase) Olda, Filip, Alena, Karim, Olivier
      • Presentation of gmkpack Olivier 30 min
      • OpenMP exercices Filip 1h
      • Merging exercices 1h
      • Real case phasing situations 1h30
    • Presentation of gmkpack and installation of a cycle (or a subproject) on PC with gmkpack
      Olivier (using the remaining time !)

Wednesday September 22th

  • Practical exercices 9h-10h30
    • Continuation of the phasing exercices started on Tuesday
    • Answer to encountered problems.
  • Discussion 10h30-12h
  • Closure of the meeting

  A few photos

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