UFS Medium-range Weather App on Azure.

[marcusgaspar]

Hello UFS community,

I'm working in a project trying to build and run UFS Medium-range Weather App on Azure.
I'm currently facing issues trying to setup all the dependencies and build UFS using Spack-stack.
I was wondering if you have already done it on Azure and could share a more detailed procedure.
I would appreciate your help.
Thank you!

[gspetro-NOAA]

Hi Marcus,

I've just reached out to @ulmononian, who may be able to help with the spack-stack issues on Azure. That said, the MRW App is not supported for community use yet. The app has changed significantly from the v1.1.0 CIME-based workflow released in Oct. 2020 using HPC-Stack. I need to get confirmation from my team, but you may do better working directly with the global-workflow, which should work with spack-stack. The global-workflow documentation is also more up-to-date, although it is a work in progress.

I'll update you once I get an MRW App status report from my team.

Best,
Gillian Petro

[gspetro-NOAA]

Hi @marcusgaspar ,

@ulmononian confirmed that building the global-workflow (or just the stand-alone ufs-weather-model) and spack-stack on Azure might be easier than trying to run MRW. Are you a NOAA employee or affiliate with access to either NOAA or JCSDA azure clusters? If so, you could access clusters where we already have spack-stack installed, which would avoid you the trouble of installing them. Otherwise you would indeed need to build the stack from scratch on your Azure instance, as you are doing. It's difficult to say how much help we could provide on a system we don't have access to, but it would at least be helpful to know what kinds of errors you're running into. Our developers may have run into similar problems building on the NOAA or JCSDA Azure clusters and could potentially provide some insight.

Best,
Gillian

[marcusgaspar]

Hi @gspetro-NOAA and @ulmononian,

I don't have access to NOAA or JCSDA azure clusters unfortunately. We were able to build spack-stack and build successfully UFS MRW App. However, my colleague Charles Peri (@cperi) I are facing issues on building UFS_UTILS. We need to build it in order to run chgres_cube. We didn't find clear build instructions for UFS_UTILS. (https://github.com/ufs-community/UFS_UTILS).
Any guidance on how to build UFS_UTILS?
Thank you!

[gspetro-NOAA]

Hi @marcusgaspar ,

The User's Guide for UFS_UTILS is here: https://noaa-emcufs-utils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
There is scientific documentation here: https://ufs-community.github.io/UFS_UTILS/index.html
Hopefully these will contain the information you need. However, if you continue to run into issues, you could reach out to @GeorgeGayno-NOAA or @JeffBeck-NOAA for some tips.

Best,
Gillian

[ulmononian]

@marcusgaspar may i ask which repo/branch of the mrw you cloned to build the mrw on azure? also, which version of spack-stack did you build there? i ask because the most recent change to the mrw (https://github.com/ufs-community/ufs-mrweather-app) was essentially to have it build the global-workflow if you use the build_global-workflow.sh script, so i am curious if this is what you used to compile on azure. please note that the mrw app is deprecated, so working with the global-workflow may be an option to look into, especially given that UFS_UTILS/chgres_cube can be built as part of this workflow.

[gspetro-NOAA]

Hi @marcusgaspar,

Did our responses resolve your question? If so, you can click "Mark as answer." It sounds like you were making good progress, but if there's anything more we can do, let us know! :)

Thanks,
Gillian