The European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is to hold a virtual workshop on ‘Weather and climate in the cloud’ on February 8-10. One of the cloud projects covered will be the European Weather Cloud. Vasileios Baousis, a key player in the development of this joint computing infrastructure with EUMETSAT, will participate in the workshop.
Vasileios trained in both weather forecasting and computing, completing a BSc at the Hellenic Air Force Academy before becoming an operational weather forecaster at the Hellenic National Meteorological Service. He was awarded two master of sciences in communication systems and data networks in the UK and Greece, followed by a PhD in ‘Mobile and distributed computing’ at the University of Athens.
He started at ECMWF in 2010 as a network application programmer and for the last few years has been part of the team leading the design, development and evolution of the European Weather Cloud infrastructure at ECMWF. His involvement has ranged from the hardware specification, deployment and configuration to deploying the cloud infrastructure, storage and orchestration.
One of ECMWF’s objectives is to make the results of research and operations available to its member states in the most appropriate form. As the volume of data produced at ECMWF continues to grow, processing close to the data is often the only way to handle them. Member and cooperating states have always had the possibility to work with the data on managed Linux clusters or the high-performance computing facility (HPCF) itself, but cloud technologies offer new possibilities to meet this objective.
Users can directly host their application close to the data and benefit from the flexibilities cloud technologies offer. The first use cases during the pilot have shown that more data can be accessed fast with software solutions which member and cooperating states would not have been able to port onto ECMWF machines.
