Docker Container for WRF
John Exby and Kate Fossell provided a method to encapsulate the WRF modeling system with a container.
From their work, we have modified the Dockerfiles to work with new code, and a couple of separate use cases. The Dockerfiles include
- Source code for WRF and WPS, from github
- External libraries required to build WRF and WPS
- Construct enough of an OS to have traditional user-level Linux capabilities
- Ability to use the GNU compiler for compilation
- OpenMPI is used for distributed memory processing
- Post-processing is available, via PDF fields, from NCL
- The static data for geogrid is available (low resolution only)
- Two Dockerfiles to allow a tutorial walk-through, or regression testing
- The tutorial case has namelists and Grib data to run end-to-end
- The regression case has metgrid output and all of the NML files from the regression suite
There is a README for each of the two Dockerfiles: tutorial and regtest. Make sure that you copy the correct Dockerfile. Either:
ln -sf Dockerfile_tutorial Dockerfile
or
ln -sf Dockerfile_regtest Dockerfile
Tutorial
The README_tutorial.md has step-by-step instructions to run the entire WRF system, from geogrid through generating PDF files with model output. We go "into" the container for the tutorial case. This is a mechanical process of the required process to churn through the modeling system parts.
docker build -t wrf_tutorial .
mkdir OUTPUT
docker run -it --name teachme -v `pwd`/OUTPUT:/wrf/wrfoutput wrf_tutorial /bin/tcsh
Regtest
The purpose of the regression test is to allow a specifically built container to conduct a number of tests. We stay outside of the container for the regression test case. Because of the way that we started this container, we need to explicitly "stop" it after we are finished.
docker build -t wrf_regtest .
docker run -d -t --name test_001 wrf_regtest /bin/tcsh
docker exec test_001 ./script.csh BUILD CLEAN 34 1 em_real -d
docker exec test_001 ./script.csh RUN em_real 34 em_real 03
docker stop test_001
For regression testing, the above two docker exec commands should each have a exit status of 0. Additionally, in the README_regtest.md file, there is explicit information for each test that may be conducted for the regression suite.