Grid-based deployment and performance measurement of the Weather Research & Forecasting model

A system developed for benchmarking multi-processor Numerical Weather Prediction applications deployed on D-Grid resources is presented. The system currently serves to perform functional and nonfunctional software tests of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model used in the project WISENT. The resulting performance data and the input configurations are automatically published through a web portal to enable third-party comparisons with other, existing WRF deployments. The developed system relies on a self-contained, domain-independent software module for running MPI and other multi-processor Grid (Globus Toolkit 4) jobs that require a user-defined synchronized initialization and cleanup phase. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved