The Universe

CCMC: Collaborative Modeling of Space Weather with Cloud and HPC

Image showing flare scorecard screen identifying solar flare precictions
Flare Scoreboard – current active solar flares regions and 24-hour predictions from a variety of models for September 1, 2023. Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), NASA/Goddard

The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), situated at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, fosters collaboration for space weather modeling across international agencies and research centers including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and several others. By bringing together a diverse community and pooling computational resources, CCMC aims to accelerate space science discoveries.

Research teams use CCMC's models and computing power to advance understanding of heliophysics, space weather, and their impacts on technology and society. Through an online portal, CCMC provides researchers with access to over 60 unique models that simulate the connected Sun-Earth system. Users can run these models interactively on NASA supercomputing resources at NASA Goddard’s Science Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE) hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and using open-source cluster management tools such as AWS ParallelCluster and Slurm.

Quick Facts

Without NASA supercomputing resources, the Community Coordinated Modeling Center would be unable to host, validate, and operate space weather models used by researchers around the world for critical space exploration, including the Moon-to-Mars mission.

Matthew Lesko,
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
  • CCMC leverages NASA supercomputing resources to the tune of hundreds of thousands of core-hours per year and multiple AWS ParallelCluster high-performance computing environments with a variety of AMD, Intel, and GPU architectures.
  • Storage locality is a continuing challenge: data needs to be moved between multiple environments.
  • Run-on-Requests (on-demand model runs): over 400 unique users around the world have requested nearly 2,000 model executions this year alone, and that number has grown every year since 2020.
  • Continuous-Runs (models operating on near-real-time data): the iSWA, Flare Scoreboard, and SEP Scoreboard provided results to hundreds of unique users a day, over 20,000 in Fiscal Year 2023, and with almost half of visits from outside the United States.

Researcher

  • Matthew Lesko, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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