NSF Workshop: Modeling Research in the Cloud

31 May - 2 June 2017, Boulder, Colorado

Historically, the atmospheric modeling community has relied mostly on high performance computing (HPC) facilities (e.g., NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing facility and XSEDE) and local computing clusters to perform their simulations and conduct their research. With the maturity of and significant advances in cloud computing, it has recently emerged as an alternative new paradigm for hosting and delivering a broad array of services over the Internet. Cloud Computing is a general term that describes a range of services for storage, data, software, and processing power via the Internet "cloud" rather than a local (e.g., departmental or campus) computer center or a central high performance computing (HPC) facility. In such an environment, we foresee a near-future in which a larger community of users, newly empowered and facilitated by the cloud, can readily access their data and applications from any device, perform virtually all of their analysis, visualization and processing remotely, and share their results and collaborate more easily. There is broad consensus that as data volumes grow rapidly, it is particularly important to reduce data movement and bring processing and computations to the data.

It is clear that there exist several challenges in research and computational practices that need to be overcome before cloud computing becomes a viable platform serving the atmospheric modeling community. The purpose of the workshop is to facilitate an in-depth discussion of the myriad aspects and formulate approaches for integrating cloud computing capabilities into the weather and climate prediction landscape and discuss the significance of such integration for advancing discoveries.

To that end, some specific goals of the workshop are to:

For additional information, please contact the Workshop Coordinator.


This workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation