Supercomputers have been the key tool for four scientists at DTU Wind Energy. Together they have more than 50 years of experience in using high performance supercomputing for their research in Meteorology, Climate and Wind Energy.
Andrea Hahmann, Merete Badger, Jana Fischereit and Xiaoli Guo Larsen have used both local, national and international HPCs, but have primarily used the HPC facility called SOPHIA based at DTU in their research. The SOPHIA system is also part of the national DeiC Throughput HPC.
“In my research, we collect satellite observations of radar signals that are returned from the sea surface, and these observations can be converted to maps of the ocean wind speed. Data is processed on SOPHIA in near real-time, meaning data is downloaded from the Copernicus Open Access Hub every day, and wind maps are published online within 24 hours,” says Merete Badger.
Andrea Hahmann adds: “A total of six petabytes of raw data was produced during the simulations in the PRACE cluster. It wasn't possible to carry out the computations on SOPHIA, which has only approximately 15.000 CPUs, as the computational burden was too large. In addition, we needed a single computer to avoid introducing differences between local calculations. At the end of the day, the NEWA could not have been performed without supercomputing".
Xiaoli Guo Larsen has used SOPHIA to simulate storms (wind and waves) and calculate extreme wind and turbulence and Jana Fischereit has used HPC to simulate the ecosystem of the atmosphere,the waves and the ocean and the effect on wind farms.
Read the full interview here:
https://www.deic.dk/news/2022-2-11/world-class-wind-energy-builds-upon-hpc