access_CoupledModelUI - ACCESS-NRI/accessdev-Trac-archive GitHub Wiki
New UI for the ACCESS coupled model
Rationale
The current version of the ACCESS coupled model (1.0 and 1.3) is run by a set of scripts, originally based on the AusCOM run scripts (AusCOM Users Guide).
In the coupled model configuration these scripts are a mixture of job control, basic job configuration (e.g. run length, number of processors) and sophisticated model configuration (e.g. choice of atmospheric model cloud overlap scheme via a script variable). Although the atmospheric model configuration is from namelists originally generated by a UMUI job, these are modified in the coupled configuration to an extent that it's not simple to get back to a UMUI job with the same configuration without explicitly comparing namelists. This makes determining experiment provenance and ensuring reproducibility more difficult.
One of the main aims of WP1 is to develop a new UI and experiment configuration database for the coupled model. For the atmospheric model the job database behind the UMUI makes it easy to copy and compare jobs. The UI and associated metadata makes it easier to configure experiments than editing namelists directly. We would like to extend these benefits to the ACCESS coupled model.
Approach
The UM is moving to using ROSE/cylc for model configuration and control (local documentation) and the UMUI will eventually become redundant. For this reason we have chose to use ROSE for the new UI along with the rosie database for storing the experiment configuration. For ACCESS 1.0 and 1.3 the atmospheric model configuration will still be edited by the existing UMUI. However the UMUI will be modified so that the basis files can be stored in the rosie DB along with the rest of the configuration rather than in the existing UMUI DB.
We expect that for ACCESS 2 the whole model configuration will use the ROSE UI.
Progress
Rose on Accessdev
Rose consists of three main programs Rosa, Rosie and Rose. Rosa is the web server. Rosie is the client for checking out suites from a repository. Rose is a collection of utilities for editing and running suites. Rose uses Cylc for scheduling suite applications.
Rosa and Rosie are currently configured under Puppet (Automation Software for System Administrators) on the NCI virtual machine Accessdev (Completed but waiting for a puppet update). Experiment information is stored in subversion repositories. Basic information about each suite/experiment eg owner, project, title are stored in a sqlite database on accessdev. Jobs are submitted from accessdev to the compute nodes via Cylc. This can be done from the command prompt by typing "rose suite-run" or via one of the rose GUI's. An overview of Rose on accessdev can be seen in the following image.
ACCESS prototype
A prototype suite of the fully couple access model has been completed. This prototype uses UMUI outputs, an "astart" file from running UM reconfiguration and executables of UM, MOM, CICE and OASIS. The prototype allows the users to select these items as well as editing namelists of the CICE and MOM model. The prototype replaces the AUSCOM scripts and simplifies the process for updating time variables. Original scripts used a rather unstable mixture of shell commands, external programs and sed trickery to do things like resetting dates in program namelists for successive runs. This is now done with python scripts that calculate time parameters based on the current run cycle and passes them into the namelists via the ROSE_TASK_OPTIONS variable. The next step of this prototype will allow users to edit the namelists of the UM model. Users will be able to run the prototype once Accessdev is updated with the latest puppet configurations.
Related Work
Current work is being done on Rosebud, which is an intermediate tool released by the Met Office for converting UMUI scripts to a rose suite. This will allow users to convert current their UM jobs (versions 8.2-8.4) to a suite and run it under rose.
Also, work is being done on incorporating APP (ACCESS Post-Processor) into rose suites. This will automate the process of converting output of the ACCESS model into data files that comply with CMIP5 standards.# Attachments
