Weather forecasting and climatology have traditionally been users of the world's fastest supercomputers. The recent emergence of massively parallel supercomputers as likely successors to current vector supercomputers has created an acute need to convert weather and climate models to suit parallel supercomputers with thousands of processors. Several major efforts are underway worldwide to accomplish this. ECMWF has established itself as the central venue for bringing together operational weather forecasters, climate researchers and parallel computer manufacturers to share their experience on these efforts every second year. The recent dramatic developments in supercomputer manufacturing have made the 1992 ECMWF Workshop timelier than before.

Weather forecasting and climatology have traditionally been users of the world's fastest supercomputers. The recent emergence of massively parallel supercomputers as likely successors to current vector supercomputers has created an acute need to convert weather and climate models to suit parallel supercomputers with thousands of processors. Several major efforts are underway worldwide to accomplish this. ECMWF has established itself as the central venue for bringing together operational weather forecasters, climate researchers and parallel computer manufacturers to share their experience on these efforts every second year. The recent dramatic developments in supercomputer manufacturing have made the 1992 ECMWF Workshop timelier than before.

The geosciences, particularly numerical weather prediction, are demanding the highest levels of available computer power. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, with its experience in using supercomputers in this field, organises every second year a workshop bringing together manufacturers, computer scientists, researchers and operational users to share their experiences and to learn about the latest developments. This book reports on the November 2000 workshop. It provides an excellent overview of the latest achievements in, and plans for the use of, new parallel techniques in meteorology, climatology and oceanography. Contents: Research and Development of the Earth Simulator (K Yoshida & S Shingu); Parallel Computing at Canadian Meteorological Centre (J-P Toviessi et al.); Parallel Elliptic Solvers for the Implicit Global Variable-Resolution Grid-Point GEM Model: Iterative and Fast Direct Methods (A Qaddouri & J Ct(r)); IFS Developments (D Dent et al.); Performance of Parallelized Forecast and Analysis Models at JMA (Y Oikawa); Building a Scalable Parallel Architecture for Spectal GCMS (T N Venkatesh et al.); Semi-Implicit Spectral Element Methods for Atmospheric General Circulation Models (R D Loft & S J Thomas); Experiments with NCEP's Spectral Model (J-F Estrade et al.); The Implementation of I/O Servers in NCEP's ETA Model on the IBM SP (J Tuccillo); Implementation of a Complete Weather Forecasting Suite on PARAM 10 000 (S C Purohit et al.); Parallel Load Balance System of Regional Multiple Scale Advanced Prediction System (J Zhiyan); Grid Computing for Meteorology (G-R Hoffmann); The Requirements for an Active Archive at the Met Office (M Carter); Intelligent Support for High I/O Requirements of Leading Edge Scientific Codes on High-End Computing Systems OCo The ESTEDI Project (K Kleese & P Baumann); Coupled Marine Ecosystem Modelling on High-Performance Computers (M Ashworth et al.); OpenMP in the Physics Portion of the Met Office Model (R W Ford & P M Burton); Converting the Halo-Update Subroutine in the Met Office Unified Model to Co-Array Fortran (P M Burton et al.); Parallel Ice Dynamics in an Operational Baltic Sea Model (T Wilhelmsson); Parallel Coupling of Regional Atmosphere and Ocean Models (S Frickenhaus et al.); Dynamic Load Balancing for Atmospheric Models (G Karagiorgos et al.); HPC in Switzerland: New Developments in Numerical Weather Prediction (M Ballabio et al.); The Role of Advanced Computing in Future Weather Prediction (A E MacDonald); The Scalable Modeling System: A High-Level Alternative to MPI (M Govett et al.); Development of a Next-Generation Regional Weather Research and Forecast Model (J Michalakes et al.); Parallel Numerical Kernels for Climate Models (V Balaji); Using Accurate Arithmetics to Improve Numerical Reproducibility and Stability in Parallel Applications (Y He & C H Q Ding); Parallelization of a GCM Using a Hybrid Approach on the IBM SP2 (S Cocke & Z Christidis); Developments in High Performance Computing at Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (K D Pollak & R M Clancy); The Computational Performance of the NCEP Seasonal Forecast Model on Fujitsu VPP5000 at ECMWF (H-M H Juang & M Kanamitsu); Panel Experience on Using High Performance Computing in Meteorology OCo Summary of the Discussion (P Prior). Readership: Researchers, professionals and students in meteorology, climatology and oceanography."

The Dawn of Massively Parallel Processing in Meteorology presents collected papers of the third workshop on this topic held at the European Centre of Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). It provides an insight into the state of the art in using parallel processors operationally, and allows extrapolation to other time-critical applications. It also documents the advent of massively parallel systems to cope with these applications.

Numerical weather prediction on the one hand needs a very large number of floating point calculations, but on the other hand is very time-critical. Therefore, the largest computers available, i.e., the "supercomputers", have usually been acquired by the national meteorological services long before they were used in other fields of research or business. Since the available technology limits the speed of any single computer, parallel computations have become necessary to achieve further improvements in the number of results produced per time unit. This book collects the papers presented at two workshops held at ECMWF on the topic of parallel processing in meteorological models. It provides an insight into the state-of-the-art in using parallel processors operationally and allows extrapolation to other time-critical applications. It also shows trends in migrating to massive parallel systems in the near future.