Challenges and Solutions in Executing Numerical Weather Prediction in a Cloud Infrastructure

Abstract Cloud Computing has emerged as a solution to perform large-scale scientific computing. The elasticity of the cloud and its pay-as-you-go model present an interesting opportunity for applications commonly executed in clusters or supercomputers. This paper presents the challenges of migrating and performing a numerical weather prediction (NWP) application in a cloud computing infrastructure. We compared the execution of this High-Performance Computing (HPC) application in a local cluster and the cloud using different instance sizes. The experiments demonstrate that, although processing and networking create a limiting factor, storing input and output datasets in the cloud present an attractive option to share results and ease the deployment of a test-bed for a weather research platform. Results show that cloud infrastructure can be used as a viable HPC alternative for numerical weather prediction software.