WRF in the Public Cloud
CAC summer student employee Jeff Lantz describes his experiences in running the WRF weather forecasting application in the public cloud. He compares the major cloud providers and some container-based deployment technologies that are available on each, with a particular emphasis on Docker and Kubernetes. Since WRF is a computationally intensive numerical simulation, Jeff had to pay special attention to certain HPC characteristics of the code, such as the need to launch multiple communicating MPI processes on one or more cloud instances, and the need to set up an NFS file server to satisfy I/O requirements.
