Using virtual machines for training at ECMWF

Transcription

1 Using virtual machines for training at ECMWF Building sound environments to improve training Stephan Siemen, Glenn Carver, Iain Russell, Sándor Kertész Forecast and Research Department, ECMWF ECMWF June 17, 2015

2 Metview Meteorological workstation & batch system developed at ECMWF Metview is released under Open Source and used at ECMWF and in many NWS by researchers and operational analysts alike Runs on Linux and MacOS X and is used from laptops to HPCF How is Metview used? The user interface allows through its innovative drag&drop interface the easy prototyping of (graphical) products Users can easily transfer their work to the Metview Macro language to generate their products in batch mode If users prefer to program for themselves they can write code in Metview high level Macro language from the start Metview Macro a = read( fielda.grib ) b = read( fieldb.grib ) c = a-b plot(c) 2

3 Software in training courses Providing meaningful training courses requires the use of professional tools But these often require a lot of setup might not even be installed Participants have different technical backgrounds (Windows, Linux, MacOS) The course should be about the science rather than technical setup At ECMWF we have worked hard to improve the installation of software Unified installation routines for all software packages Working with the communities to provide binary packages Ubuntu 15/04 has Metview; RPM based Linux distributions can use packages built at the SuSE s Open Build Service (OBS) But how can we reach the ones who can not install on Unix systems? Provide virtual machines with pre-installed Metview Users can explore in a safe environment without worrying about the setup 3

4 Virtual Machines used in research training course The 'basic' Metview virtual machine contains pre-installed Metview Software plus material from recent Metview training courses More specialised versions of the virtual machine have been used in training courses given by the ECMWF researchers In one course all exercises based on the OpenIFS project training were set on the VM Including the running of its Single Column model Participants could take all exercises back to their institutes 4

5 Benefits of using Virtual Machines Fast setup during the course (all pre-prepared in VM) All participants start with the same environment Participants can use checkpoints to revert to a previous state of the machine Participants can be assured that they will not impact other users Participants can take environment back home Course material can be revisited anytime, because the system is frozen 5

6 Metview and VMs in action 6

7 How to build VMs? The course materials were based on the Virtual Appliance (Virtual Machine with a dedicated software) built by the Metview team to support the outreach of the Metview workstation & batch system VM itself was built using the SuSE Studio service using RPMs of ECMWF software built on the OpenBuild Service from Novell This service is only one of many tools/web services offering the creation/building Virtual Appliances The SuSE Studio service is open to everyone and allows in its web interface to easily customise software installation and graphical layout Anyone can clone from the Metview appliance to add own material The Gallery market place allows easy sharing of appliances VMs used in research training courses used these VMs as their basis and had additionally installed data and scripts to run the exercises as part of the training material. For some courses we started Firefox at first login with a welcome page (in HTML). 7

8 Some things to look out for There are still some technical challenges Network access, Shared folder with host machine, BIOS settings of host, Slight difference between VM players (VirtualBox, VMplayer, ); especially their tools to interact with host system Not straight forward to offer good 3D performance VMs allow easy testing beforehand on the host machines You have to be careful on licences and IPR of what you hand out Always good to check this carefully The images are on the large size (~1GB) Require sufficient disk space and memory (~2GB) from the Host 8

9 See it in action this afternoon Iain Russell 15:00 15:45 will demo the base VM we have for Metview in the Classroom (downstairs) 9

10 Visualisation in meteorology week 28 Sep 2 Oct 2015 Week of events 15th Workshop on Meteorological Operational Systems (MOS) 26th European Working Group on Operational Meteorological Workstations (EGOWS) Exhibition of visualisation systems (joint MOS & EGOWS) Royal Meteorological Society - Seminar on Visualisation in meteorology MetOcean DWG OGC plug-fest Good opportunity to see (ECMWF s) latest developments and projects For more information see 10