Notes on WRF Installation

This is a collection of notes on the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) developed primarily by NCAR, NOAA, and other agencies. The notes are mainly related to the porting of WRF to an AMD Turion platform running SUSE Linux 10.0 and the Intel ifort/icc compilers. They are provided in the hope that they are useful but come with no guarantees.

This section may grow as I continue to work with WRF, and format and/or organization may change slightly. At this point, there is only the configuration file

that contains the changes to compile on the Linux AMD Turion platform. Place this file in its default location (overwriting the original one) and run the "configure" script in the main WRF directory. You should then see the following screen output:

      ------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Please select from among the following supported platforms.
      
      1.  PC Linux x86_64 (AMD Turion), ifort+icc compiler (single-threaded, no nesting)
      2.  ...
      3.  ...

      Enter selection [1-3] :
      

where the number of selections depends on the "#ARCH" lines in "configure.defaults" that the WRF "configure" script matches to your platform.

If your aim is to port WRF to yet another Unix/Linux system, clone a block in "configure.defaults" (defined between two lines of "#############", with the first line starting with "#ARCH"), check the output of the "uname -a" command, adjust the "#ARCH" line accordingly, and change the compiler settings to your needs. For the first trial, change as little as possible and see how far it gets you.

For reference, the output from the "uname -a" command on the AMD Turion system I ported WRF to is

       Linux fudo 2.6.13-15.8-default #1 Tue Feb 7 11:07:24 UTC 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
      

Note on "-DIFORT_KLUDGE": If you have a recent version of Intel ifort (certainly Version 9.0), you may want to consider not to use this flag. It is passed to the Fortran preprocessor and is supposed to speed up compilation of a number of (module) files. In actuality, however, it may achieve quite the opposite (I never managed to finish compilation with this flag). Your own mileage may vary.

WRFSI Compilation

If you are installing WRFSI on an AMD platform using Intel/ifort, you are running a good chance that the compilation of hinterp.exe will fail with a sleuth of undefined references to the netCDF library. The origin of these errors is the (for AMD/ifort) wrong order of libraries in the final link step of the executable. To fix, download this wrfsi/src/hinterp/Makefile and move it to the ./src/hinterp/ subdirectory in your main WRFSI tree, where it will overwrite the original Makefile. Run a "make realclean" in the top directory and recompile. That should lead to a successful build of WRFSI.

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