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 non-functional 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.