Enhancing the accessibility of unified modeling systems: GFDL System for High-resolution prediction on Earth-to-Local Domains (SHiELD) v2021b in a container

Abstract

Container technology provides a pathway to facilitate easy access to unified modeling systems and opens opportunities for collaborative model development and interactive learning. In this paper, we present the implementation of software containers for the System for High-resolution prediction on Earth-to-Local Domains (SHiELD), a unified atmospheric model for weather-to-seasonal prediction. The containerized SHiELD is cross-platform and easy to install. Flexibility of the containerized SHiELD is demonstrated as it can be configured as a global, a global-nest, and a regional model. Bitwise reproducibility is achieved on various x86 systems tested in this study. Performance and scalability of the containerized SHiELD are evaluated and discussed.