First meeting of the technical working group

Minutes

Date: 2nd August 2016
Attendees:

  • Marshall Ward (NCI, Chair)
  • Aidan Heerdegen (ARCCSS)
  • Nic Hannah (ARCCSS/Breakaway Labs)
  • Justin Freeman (BoM)
  • Russ Fiedler and Matt Chamberlain (CSIRO Hobart)

Agreed to have monthly videoconference meetings.

COSIMA model definitions on website

  • Who is the audience? Agreed should pitch it at novice researcher/student with no links to existing community
  • Should start by using ourselves as the audience, define them for our use and expand from there
  • First test case should be the ACCESS-OM-025 (Quarter degree MOM+CICE+OASIS-mct)
  • CICE is currently housed on CWS github repo
  • Agreed we need consolidated location for model code. Nic suggested a git repo pulling in model components using submodules. This makes it clean to install and allows for control of versions via explicit commits or tags
  • COSIMA name is taken on github, so agreed to use existing OceansAus group
  • Minimal technical detail on website, instead point to github repo

Input data

  • Data store for model input files – decided to use the ua8 Ramadda location which is currently used for MOM5 test cases
  • Need data versioning

Benchmarking

  • Need example outputs, and timings. Direct users to run the model and compare their outputs and timings to those supplied to verify model integrity and performance
  • Need continuous integration to test against these outputs. Nic currently running a dozen test cases on a Jenkins server for MOM5. Can add these tests too.
  • Essential to allow upgrading of model components with confidence they have not affected model integrity and performance.

Tools/Utilities

  • Desirable to also have related tools and utilities on the OceansAus github site
  • Concerns that the site collect crufty tools, so make some standard for what constitutes a repo: utility, support and documentation?

Model Support

  • How do we support these models? Decided the existing MOM mailing list would suffice for general user questions. Stephen Griffies has been interested in supporting a MOM-CICE configuration. Also github issues can be used for specific code issues.

Mission Statement

  • Desirable to have a general mission statement about what the aims of the TWG
  • Any additional invitees? Perhaps Mirko from the BoM? Open invitation to anyone who wants to attend and contribute

General technical discussion

  • Aidan described progress with improving vertical grid in MOM-SIS 0.1 deg config
  • Justin working on making his real time flythrough data-vis software available on raijin, Maybe use Russ’ BRAN2015 reanalysis dataset with recent El Nino
  • Matt is adding sea-ice to the OFAM grid and tuning parameters to reduce SST biases. Turning off neutral physics helped.
  • Ben Evans wants a WOMBAT test case, perhaps use the 0.25 deg runs Matt did with Paul Spence?
  • Marshall has updated FMS and he and Nic have used Jenkins testing to find and fix bugs. Close to being added to master branch of MOM5

COSIMA website

  • A lot of enthusiasm for contributing blog posts to website from technical perspective.

Actions

  • Aidan to add Nic to OceansAus group
  • Nic to create initial ACCESS-OM-025 repo with submodules for MOM5/CICE/OASIS-mct
  • Justin volunteered to test out initial model config as “new user”
  • Marshall to write draft mission statement