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Modelling infrastructure support systems

The Modelling Infrastructure Support Systems team develop software infrastructure used to produce our forecasts and research.

This includes infrastructure to support software development and for configuring and running our scientific software such as the Unified Model.

It is essential to quality control and review changes when developing our scientific software. This is done through the use of open-source tools such as FCM software, Trac and Subversion. FCM is a build system for modern Fortran software applications which is developed and maintained by this team. FCM's fast compiling of code means that changes to our software can be tested as quickly as possible. FCM also provides bespoke wrappers to the Subversion version control system.

The Met Office runs highly complex suites of scientific software in both our operational forecasting and in our research. The Modelling Infrastructure Support Systems team is responsible for essential underlying software infrastructure: Rose (developed by this team) and Cylc,a collaborative effort with New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). Rose and Cylc are used to configure and control our suites of scientific software.

FCM (GitHub),  Rose (GitHub), and Cylc (GitHub) are open-source software and freely available for anyone to use.

Key aims

  • Support version control, issue tracking, and other infrastructure for scientific software development.
  • Develop and support a modern Fortran build system (FCM).
  • Develop and support infrastructure for configuring and running suites of scientific software (Rose & Cylc).

Current projects

  • Improve our software infrastructure including Rose and Cylc to ensure efficient use of our HPC and other computing resource for running increasingly complex meteorological applications.