Workflow Automation for Cycling Systems

Workflow Automation for Cycling Systems

Oliver, Hilary (The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research)
Shin, Matthew (Met Office)
Matthews, David (Met Office)
Sanders, Oliver (Met Office)
Bartholomew, Sadie (Met Office)
Clark, Andrew (Met Office)
Fitzpatrick, Ben (Met Office)
Haren, R. van (Netherlands eScience Center)
Hut, R.W. (TU Delft Water Resources)
Drost, Niels (Netherlands eScience Center)

2019

Complex cycling workflows are fundamental to numerical weather prediction (NWP) and related environmental forecasting systems. Large numbers of jobs are executed at regular intervals to process new data and generate new forecasts. Dependence between these forecast cycles creates a single never-ending workflow, but NWP workflow schedulers have traditionally ignored this-at the cost of efficiency when running “off the clock”-by enforcing a simpler nonoverlapping sequence of single-cycle workflows. Cylc (“Silk”)1 -3 is designed to manage infinite cycling workflows efficiently even after delays in real-time operation, or in historical runs, when cycles can typically interleave for much-increased throughput. Cylc is not actually specialized to environmental forecasting, however, and cycling workflows may also be useful in other contexts. In this paper, we describe the origins and major features of Cylc, future plans for the project, and our experience of Open Source development and community engagement.

automation
geophysics computing
weather forecasting
workflow management software

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4417f7eb-d111-4534-b706-e272af49925d

https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2019.2906593

1558-366X

Computing in Science & Engineering, 21 (4), 7-21

Accepted Author Manuscript

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2019 Hilary Oliver, Matthew Shin, David Matthews, Oliver Sanders, Sadie Bartholomew, Andrew Clark, Ben Fitzpatrick, R. van Haren, R.W. Hut, Niels Drost