CWO-Based HPCMP Systems Assessment Using HYCOM and WRF

Each year the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program HPCMP) acquires new supercomputing hardware through a rigorous HPC hardware acquisition process that is based primarily on applications benchmarking. The corresponding suite of applications spans many disciplines and is carefully constructed to accurately reflect typical workloads on HPCMP platforms. For the most recent HPC acquisition process (called TI-05 for technology insertion for fiscal year 2005), HYCOM and WRF were used to represent the computational weather and ocean modeling (CWO) portion of the workload. This paper will compare selected HPCMP platforms in terms of performance for each of three CWO application test cases (the standard and large test cases for HYCOM, and the standard test case for WRF) within the TI-05 benchmarking suite.