Parallelisation of NCMRWF Forecast Model on13; Flosolver Mk3

Weather Forecasting has made exacting demands on computational resources at any' point of time. The complexities are so enormous that such a calculation is beyond the reach of average computers. To get a feel for the requirements, it should suffice to say that the sustained speed of 100 MFLOPS will be termed moderate, Random Access Memory.(RAM) availability of 100 MBytes .will be called manageable13; and a disk storage of tens of GBytes will be considered marginal for an operational forecast. In the last decade, the technology of parallel computing has reached a stage of maturity and holds the promise of being an alternative to conventional supercomputing. To explore this alternative, on 23rd November 1992 a brain storming session on 'Future . Supercomputing Strategy for Medium Range Weather Forecastingquot; [1] was convened and the summary record described the consensus in the following words:13; quot;The consensus emerging from the session was that parallel processing systems have not yet become proven tools for operational medium 'range weather forecasting within the country or abroad. However. Ramp;D needs to be fostered within the country. It would therefore, be desirable to continue to provide support for this activity with which NCMRWF should be actively associated, but without hampering13; its goal of operational medium range weather forecastingquot