The 30th Computing Representatives’ meeting took place at the Centre from Wednesday 16 to Friday 18 May 2018. The meeting enabled the Representatives and ECMWF staff to exchange their experiences and provided ECMWF with very useful feedback on the services provided.
ECMWF has over 3,000 registered external users with access to its high-performance computing facility and ecgate (see box). It has many more web-only users, 10,000 of whom are from our Member and Co-operating States. Each Member State and Co-operating State is asked to appoint a ‘Computing Representative' to represent users in their countries on day-to-day matters relating to the use of ECMWF’s computing and archiving service. Representatives also help people to access ECMWF’s facilities, and they provide some support for users in their organisation. To support the work of the Computing Representatives, ECMWF organises meetings with them, typically every 12 to 18 months. This year’s event was attended by 26 external participants from 23 organisations. The meeting provides a forum for ECMWF and the Member and Co-operating States to exchange views and experiences. Representatives usually give an update on their computing environment and on their use of ECMWF’s computing and archiving systems. The first such meeting took place in 1980.
This year, ECMWF gave a series of reports on the latest changes in its services, including the new Copernicus Climate Data Store and cloud-related services. ECMWF also presented Metview’s new Python interface and the new Meteorological Interpolation and Regridding package (MIR). The Member and Co-operating States gave presentations on:
- their experiences of significant IT transformation exercises (e.g. creation of new IT services, significant changes in IT services, move of their data centre, lessons learnt in doing this)
- their experiences in providing remote access to their IT services (e.g. what sort of access they provide, whether they use Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and whether access differs by type of user).
All presentations are available to registered users on the ECMWF website at:
www.ecmwf.int/en/about/who-we-are/representatives/computing-representatives-meeting-2018
ecgate
ecgate is a Linux cluster available to registered users from ECMWF’s Member and Co-operating States. This general-purpose computing facility can among other things be used to carry out pre- and post-processing work that is not suitable for the supercomputer; to access the Data Handling System; and to transfer data to and from external sites.