Help using GRADS in parallel

[pierre.lacombe at MDDEP.GOUV.QC.CA]

Développement durable,
Environnement et Parcs
Québec

 

I work for the Centre d'Expertise Hydrique du Québec (CEHQ, http://www.cehq.gouv.qc.ca), which is an agency of the Québec's ministry of environment (formely the Ministère du développement durable et des parcs du gouvernement du Québec). Among various objectives, the CEHQ operates the hydrometric network of the province of Québec and supports the management of public dams by producing hydrological forecasts.

 

Over nearly ten years, our hydrological forecasts have been produced dayly at a 3h timestep by integrating meteorological forecasts data of the canadian model GEM.  To process the GEM input data, we use the GRADS system  (Grid Analysis and Display System (GrADS), version 1.8SL11. We run GRADS on a serial computer, an it works perfectly well. However, recently we aquired a few quadcores computers and found a way to make GRADS work in parallel for us. The idea is simple, and consists to let GRADS 1 computes the temperature mean, while GRADS 2 computes the precipitation in the same time. As a result, we save half of the computing time every morning. This work almost fine, except that in certains executions we have an error of initialisation of GRADS or GRADS sometimes freezes. So we are unable to use this idea for now.

 

We wonder if there is a version of GRADS that works in parallel, or are there some limits to the use of GRADS that we should know, and that we could overpass with some adjustments.

 

We thank you in advance for any technical assistance you may kindly provide to us, or for your help by transmitting this message to a colleague that may better answer to these questions.

 

Best Regards,

 

Pierre Lacombe, computer analyst

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