Enda O'Brien, Ph.D.
Enda is currently managing the Met Éireann-funded research project, TRANSLATE. The aim of this project is to standardise the national high-resolution climate projections produced by ICHEC [e.g., 1, 2].
Enda is both a meteorologist and an expert in HPC and parallel programming, with a long track record both in academia (Univ. of Miami, GFDL/Princeton Univ., King Abdulaziz Univ., Jeddah) and industry (DEC/Compaq/HP, Dalco AG Switzerland, and Fujitsu), including a happy spell at ICHEC in the earlier days (2011-2016). Most of his work has been related to understanding how the earth's weather and climate systems work. This led him to the development of weather and climate models, and hence to making them perform efficiently, especially in parallel. Besides using the standard tools of MPI and OpenMP, Enda did a lot of porting and optimizing of weather (and other) models on GPUs and Xeon Phi coprocessors.
Enda has also carried out extensive optimisation work with several commercial CFD applications such as Fluent, Star-CD, OpenFOAM, and Pamcrash, and other standard HPC applications such as NASTRAN, CPMD, and NAMD. He ran the Linpack benchmark test to qualify several systems for places on the top500 list (as high as no. 60, in Nov. 2006). With ICHEC colleagues, he developed an automated wind-forecasting system for wind-farms. He also demonstrated the feasibility of running Met Eireann's HARMONIE weather forecast model at ultra-high resolution (0.5km grid-size) - stably and reliably. For the benefit of anyone else who might have to struggle with HARMONIE, he wrote the HARMONIE user guide.
Selected Publications |
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O'Brien, E.W., 2015: Coarse-Grained OpenMP for Scalable Hybrid Parallelism. Ch. 17 in “High Performance Parallelism Pearls, Vol. 2”, James Reinders & Jim Jeffers Eds.,pub. Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 321-334. (See http://lotsofcores.com/ and http://store.elsevier.com/product.jsp?isbn=9780128038192) |
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O’Brien, E., 2019. Balancing the Potential Vorticity Seesaw: The Bare Essentials of Baroclinic Instability. Earth Syst. Environ. 3, 341-351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41748-019-00128- |
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Müller, A., Deconinck, W., Kühnlein, C, et multi al., 2019. The ESCAPE Project: Energy-efficient Scalable Algorithms for Weather Prediction at Exascale. Geosci. Model Dev., 12, 4425-4441. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-4425-201 |
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Rahman, A., M., Almazroui, M.N. Islam, E. O’Brien, A.E. Yousef, 2018. The role of land surface fluxes in Saudi-KAU AGCM: Temperature climatology over the Arabian Peninsula for the period 1981-2010. Atmos. Res, 200, 139-152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2017.10.011 |
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Abid, M.A., M. Almazroui, F. Kucharski, E. O’Brien, A. Yousef, 2018: ENSO relationship to summer rainfall variability and its potential predictability over Arabian Peninsula region. NPJ Climate and Atmos. Science, 1, 7pp. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-017-0003-7 |
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Almazroui, M., et al., 2017: Saudi-KAU Coupled Global Climate Model: Description and Performance. Earth Syst. Environ. 1: 7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41748-017-0009-7 |
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Ehsan, M. A., Almazroui, M., Yousef, A., O’Brien, E., Tippett, M. K., Kucharski, F. and Alkhalaf, A. A., 2017: Sensitivity of AGCM-simulated regional JJAS precipitation to different convective parameterization schemes. Int. J. Climatol , 16pp. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5108 |
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O’Brien, E.W., 2015: Experiments with HARMONIE on Xeon Phi coprocessors. ALADIN-HIRLAM Newsletter No. 5, pp. 53 – 60. http://www.cnrm.meteo.fr/aladin/IMG/pdf/nl5.pdf |
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O’Brien, E.W., and A. Ralph, 2015. Operational Evaluation of a Wind-Farm Forecasting System. Energy Procedia 76 (2015 ) 216 – 222. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610215016793. |
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Peters, Martin, E.W. O’Brien, A. McKinstry and A. Ralph, 2013. Wind Forecasting using HARMONIE with Bayes Model Averaging for Fine Tuning. Energy Procedia 40 (2013 ) 95 –101. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610213016068 . |
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O’Brien, E.W., 2012. Numerical Stability and Kinetic Energy Spectra in High-Resolution HARMONIE. HIRLAM Newsletter No. 59, pp. 27-32. http://www.hirlam.org/index.php/component/docman/doc_download/1432-hirlam-newsletter-no-59-december-2012?Itemid=70 |
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O’Brien, E.W., 2012. ICHEC HARMONIE User Guide. http://www.hirlam.org/index.php/component/docman/doc_download/1346-ichec-harmonie-user-guide-enda-o-brien?Itemid=70 |
