The SCOOP infrastructure has been designed to support the urgent and dynamic deployment of ensembles of coastal models, where different members of the ensemble can have different urgency levels and different priority levels. Here we describe some of these new capabilities:

During a hurricane event, different coastal hydrodynamics models are executed to predict quantities such as wave height and storm surge. The input to the ensemble of models is wind field data obtained from various sources including analytic models and fully 3D computational models.

The SCOOP Application Manager (SAM) allows ensembles to be created either from template configurations for a particular region or scenario, by customized user input through the SCOOP portal, or by future dynamically created ensembles built using storm and region properties. The SAM configures ensembles using parameters for each ensemble member which set: (i) the model to be run; (ii) the track used to calculate forcing wind fields; (iii) the level of urgency; (iv) and the priority compared to other runs.

The urgency parameter specifies the immediateness of the job to be performed and can be set to one of the keywords red, orange or green. An urgency level of red indicates that the job should run immediately, if necessary by preempting other jobs running on a resource. An urgency of orange indicates the job should run in high priority mode, for example as next to run on a batch queue. Urgency levels of green are used for “normal” jobs, which do not have special access to resources. A second integer-valued parameter for priority specifies the order in which jobs should be completed.

The ensemble configuration information is encoded into an XML file called the Ensemble Description File (Fig. 4). The EDF contains the science information about the ensemble member and does not contain any resource specific information.

The SCOOP Application Manager consists of multiple other components such as a resource broker that generates a list of resources and their capabilities such as access to on-demand queues, type of batch system, etc. The Application Manager then sends the list of available resources on which these ensemble members can be executed, which is used by the scheduler to dispatch the job to the resource.

The SCOOP Workflow system consists of two basic components: The SCOOP scheduler and the Workflow manager. The scheduler takes the track execution requests from SAM accompanied with resource availability information (ERDF). The track execution requests are generated by SAM using the information in the EDF files. These requests contain all the information the scheduler needs to generate, schedule, and execute ensemble track subworkflows. A sample track execution request is shown below in Figure 5.