DAVAI environment & interface

This project contains:

• the DAVAI command-line tools, to create DAVAI experiments and run them,
• the configuration files to handle general preferences and machine-dependent installation,
• the documentation

Note that the core of DAVAI (tests templates, jobs sequences, config files and launching wrappers) are hosted separately, in the DAVAI-tests repository.

Installation

• on belenos@MF

• on Atos/bologna@ECMWF

• To setup your own install:

  • Clone this repository, e.g. in ~/repositories/:
    git clone https://github.com/ACCORD-NWP/DAVAI-env.git
  • Set paths:
    • DAVAI_ENV=~/repositories/DAVAI-env
    • export PATH=$DAVAI_ENV/bin:$PATH
    • export PYTHONPATH=$DAVAI_ENV/src:$PYTHONPATH
  • Assert dependencies (see below) are satisfied

• If you want to inspect possible customizations:

  • davai-config show
  • davai-config preset_user

Quick start

A Tutorial is available in the User Guide (cf. below).

For a quick start:

1. Prepare an experiment based on version <v> of the tests, to validate an IAL Git reference <r>:
   davai-new_xp <r> -v <v> [-h]
   (you may need to specify the path to your IAL repository by argument, cf. options with -h)
   To know what version of the tests to use, cf. below.
2. Go to the prompted directory of the experiment (ending with .../dv-<nnnn>-<platform>@<user>/davai/nrv/)
3. Run the tests: davai-run_xp and monitor (standard output for the build, then job scheduler).
4. If you need to re-build & re-run tests:

• davai-build [-h]
• davai-run_tests [-h]

More details to be found in the User Guide.

Tests versions and reference experiments

=> https://github.com/ACCORD-NWP/DAVAI-tests/wiki/Versions-of-tests

Documentation

The User Guide is available for main releases on: https://github.com/ACCORD-NWP/DAVAI-env/releases

Otherwise it is also available under doc/ directory. Part of the documentation needs to be compiled from .tex sources, using pdflatex. To do so, from within the repository root, type:

• make doc

and the generated PDF document will be found under doc/pdf/Davai_User_Guide.pdf.

Dependencies

DAVAI is mainly written in Python3. Make sure you have Python3.6 at least. It also uses Git, make sure you have a "recent enough" version of it, or some commands may not work properly. DAVAI works over a number of NWP packages, tools, software, that need to be installed on the machine with their own procedures. These include:

• Vortex: scripting system used for the definition of tasks (resources, executables launch, ...) and the running of the jobs. It embeds a number of necesary-as-well sub-packages.
• ecbundle: a utility from ECMWF to gather codes from several repositories, in the required version for each, based on a YAML descriptive file (called bundle); used in IAL-build
• IAL-build: wrappers around git and gmkpack (and eventually other building tools) to build IAL executables from Git
• IAL-expertise: tools to analyse automatically the outputs of NWP configurations -- norms, Jo-tables, fields in FA/GRIB files, ...
• EPyGrAM: a Python library for handling output data from the IAL models; it is used here within IAL-expertise.

These packages may already be pre-installed on MF's HPC or other platforms where DAVAI is already ported. Cf. the "Local complements" in "Installation" section, in this case.

To install them on a new machine, cf. the projects' installation instructions.

Lexicon

• DAVAI = "Device Aiming at the VAlidation of IAL"
• IAL = IFS-Arpege-LAM