Working in Barcelona on the Interpolation Tool

Hello! Over half of the Summer of HPC programme is already in the past so I figured it was about time to update my blog accordingly. Over the past month, we have had the chance to meet a lot of different people from the Computational Earth Science department at the Supercomputing Center in Barcelona, and more specifically the post-processing team. In addition to this, we of course gotten familiar with the Interpolation Tool and started working on the bugs and features we should try to fix and implement.

What is this Interpolation Tool?

The Interpolation Tool (Abbreviated ‘it’, exactly like Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel) is, as stated in its name, a tool that performs interpolation on a given set of points. Often, when performing measurements or forecasts as in our case, the resulting data comes in a form that does not exactly suit your needs. There could for instance not be a station at the point you need data about. In this case, one should use the given observations/forecasts in order to make an educated “guess” about the data lying in between the existing points. Depending on the interpolation method, this requires a lot of computational power even for small datasets, so there is definitely a need for HPC when dealing with large data.

What am I doing?

This tool has been in development for already a few years, but still presents some bugs misses some features. That is where we step in! Over the course of the past month, I have been transforming the standalone tool into a Python package, integrated pointwise interpolation and am now working on solving a known “freezing bug” occurring under specific configurations. Now that I have a deeper understanding of how the package is working I feel like I can work more efficiently and achieve the wished goals. Once these tasks are finalized, I hope to still have time to implement another type of grid the tool can interpolate to.

Although we are not in Barcelona I do still find a way to enjoy the nice Dutch weather, and hope you do so as well! If you have any questions please ask them in the comment section or feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.