The ALADIN Workstation Coordination group

What is AWOC ?

Discussions about portability of the ALADIN code to different platforms and problems linked to operational implementation are the main topic of the AWOC group.

Aladin WOrking Coordination group birth (AWOC )

The main point of the agenda of the informal ALADIN meeting organized besides the EWGLAM/SRNWP Conference (Budapest, October 6-10, 1997) was the discussion on the definition of the AWOC (Aladin WOrkstation Co-ordination group).

Following the comments presented during this meeting, a AWOC definition document has been proposed and four AWOC members have been intrusted :

• one LACE representative (Jure Jerman from Slovenia),
• one SELAM representative (Liviu Dragulanescu from Romania) and
• two representatives from Météo-France (Patrick Le Moigne from GMAP/EXT and Jean-François Estrade from SCEM/TTI/Valparaiso team).

The proposed document aims to define the position of the AWOC, its composition and way of working, as well as its main tasks.

1st AWOC Meeting

Part of the discussion held on Friday 20th February 1998 in Toulouse during the 4th ALADIN Workshop on various implementations of the model was devoted to the Aladin WOrkstation Coordination group.

The need to redefine and reorganize the AWOC-group has been recognized, in particular the need to clarify its responsibilities and the way it should work. Some goals have been identified:

• hold regular coordination meetings for technical questions and future plans (1 or 2 per year): link with scientific topics, definition of contents and scheduling for new developments. For this point, the coordination meetings between ECMWF and Météo-France could be the reference.
• supervise the specific routines that need to be updated for WS and manage a WS-auxiliary library (10 to 20 routines).
• control that the WS developments are fed back into the main Ald-trunk at each major phasing.

Members of the AWOC-committee were redefined :

• scientific person: Andras Horanyi
• gourou: Eric Sevault
• Toulouse team: Jean-Marc Audoin
• WS people: Jure Jerman, Liviu Dragulanescu
• multitask platform: Martin Janousek

2nd AWOC Meeting : an illtempered note from Claude Fischer

The 2nd AWOC meeting was organized besides the EWGLAM/SRNWP meetings in Copenhagen, October 5-9, 1998.

What is AWOC ? in the beginning, it was dedicated to "Aladin WOrkstation Coordination". Though this topic was rather general, it suited well the needs of many services which had preliminary ALADIN installations and no operational duties. Indeed, AWOC might then have been a good forum for exchanging knowledge and tools for workstation implementations.

Unfortunately, AWOC remained in a rather "spectral" shape without any real existence.

A new start is therefore proposed, based on the discussions of the last AWOC meetings (last February in Toulouse first and also during EWGLAM in Copenhagen, October 6th, 1998). In a somewhat pioneering effort, a set of Aladin concerned persons redefined slightly the goals of AWOC.

Portability remains a major topic of AWOC, but it is now extended to every platform: workstations, Cray-computers etc... and to operations related problems. To make the coordination and the contacts as easy as possible, a specific awoc mailing list has been created under the Toulouse majordomo system, which allows also for keeping a historical traceback. In a more general sense, AWOC will treat specific problems linked with operational implementations as well: installation of new versions, new setups and namelists, installation of new tools ...

This issue has become more important since several services are now running quasi-operational Aladin forecasts.

Some points have been discussed in detail during the last AWOC meeting:

• e923: several countries wish to run their own climatological tasks; it was proposed to put at disposal a set of e923 scripts on the Fujitsu, so that every country can run the configuration on this machine. The scripts used for the last change in clim files (November 19th) are already available on delage machine. New simpler scripts and a documentation will be provided with the next cycle (AL10), which will solve the identified remaining problems in E923. A workstation version and the associated tools will also be available at that time. Thanks to Gabor Radnoti, Tamas Szabo, Mehdi El Abed, Neva Pristov, Jaouad Boutahar and Patrick Le Moigne.
• another mailing list has been defined, dedicated to a wider talk and exchange of information between all the Aladin operators among the world. This "alabobo" list (ALAdin Best Of Brave Operators) is dedicated to the exchange of practical questions concerning operational or platform-related problems. The idea is that somebody sends his question like a bottled message to the sea, and hopefully gets the answer from at least one correspondant.
• LACE has created a half-post "Aladin/LACE System Coordinator" (ASC), who will help for creating new export versions. The task is temporarily shared by Radmila Bubnova and Maria Siroka.
• Eric Sevault, representing the cyclists, has presented the latest versions of the code: xrd08 and xrd19 for the auxiliary library and AL09+bugfix 3 for the model. Misfunctions and bugs, found at an early stage, should be reported via the "awoc" list. Later on, they could travel via the "alabobo" list.

The AWOC meeting was closed during dinner in a nice Copenhagen restaurant, a situation which underlines very impressively the strong will of the AWOC people to continue this collaboration.

3rd AWOC meeting

An AWOC meeting took place during the 6th ALADIN workshop in Bucarest on February 17, 1999.

• The extended activities of the AWOC group have been recalled during the discussions at the Aladin workshop in Bucarest (devoted to fixing installation or operation problems, code, compiler or related bugs).
• In this frame, it was noticed that the auxiliary library had missing routines (xrd19). Also, non-standard non-ANSI code was detected (to be in general reported to the gourous). Duplicated declarations of variables cause some compilers to fail. Also, the order of the declarations should be carefully checked. Some shortcomings have been reported recently (march) by Luc Gerard and the gourous have sworn some of them will be fixed over xrd21.
• Some news on CY20 were given (see the detailed report in this newsletter). Also, the cleaning for CY21 was mentioned: IMPLICIT NONE, free source format, fortran 90 generic types used for the definition of real expression accuracies (see Eric Sevault's description in the previous newsletter). It was recalled that the surface reservoir for frozen water in the soil parametrization will not become operational before april 99. The preparations for the switch have started and the date of the change should be May, 17th.
• The status of the documentation was mentioned. For the reports, the Aladintheque is regularly updated with the latest ''stagiere's`` reports. Nothing was started to translate the documentation of the physics into english. The existence of a rather complete IFS documentation was mentioned. This documentation can be installed on the Prague webserver for the LACE countries but does not concern the Arpege physics. For non-LACE countries, only a delivery via mail, on their specific demand, is possible.