For those of you using MARS on the European Weather Cloud, you may be interested to know we have made available an updated MARS client that fully supports the latest additions to our data catalogue, such as the data produced by our new data-driven model AIFS.
As part of this update, we also took the opportunity to harmonise the credential setup process with other ECMWF tools for a more consistent experience. You can now set it up the same way you would do it for the ECMWF Web API client:
- Copy your credentials from https://api.ecmwf.int/v1/key/.
- Paste them in your VM's
~/.ecmwfapircfile. - Start downloading data!
Any new instances on the data layout will already be set up with the new versions. For existing instances, you may need to manually issue an update through the package manager of your operating system to benefit from the changes.
If you had already configured your instance using the legacy method, MARS will continue to work after the update, so no action is needed from your side. However, you will need to use the new method in the future when your current credentials expire, since the old mars command line options --email and --token have been discontinued.
Check out our EWC MARS access page for more information on how to use MARS on the European Weather Cloud.
Dear EWC users !
We are pleased to announce the general availability for EWC users of DNS at both ECMWF and EUMETSAT side of the cloud.
EWC provides DNS to each tenancy and it has the following specifications:
- The DNS record assigned to each machine has the following pattern <machine-name>.<tenancy-name>.<hosting-location>.ewcloud.host where:
- hosting-location: f means an ECMWF-hosted VM and s means a EUMETSAT-hosted VM
- tenancy-name: "mytenant" that you can find from this page Logging in to Morpheus or (only for tenancy admins) go to Administration → Users → Identity Sources
- machine-name: no spaces are allowed in the VM name, if you provision a VM with spaces in the name the record won't be created. Moreover if the name has capital letters, the domain will use lower letters.
- Example: myvm.example_tenancy.s.ewcloud.host
The DNS record is created after provisioning a machine in Morpheus and it is available after some minutes (up to 15 minutes).
If a machine has both private IP and public IP, the public IP will be assigned to the DNS record. If you need the private IP instead, please raise a ticket.
These default DNS names are intended to allow simpler usage when testing or developing. If you wish to run a public-facing service, we recommend additionally using a specific (or your organisation's) DNS domain.
You can find more information on the EWC Knowledge base here: EWC DNS
As always, if you need any support on this, please do get in touch with us on rocketchat or through the European Weather Cloud Support Portal.
Kind regards,
EWC Team
This year's European Weather Cloud (EWC) research and development (R&D) call has been released. Researchers from any publicly funded organisation within a EUMETSAT Member State country can apply for resources for R&D projects to be conducted on the EWC. For further information on this opportunity see: https://user.eumetsat.int/news-events/news/european-weather-cloud-research-and-development-call
To take advantage of the call, applications are due by 30 June 2024, for projects starting in October 2024. There are also opportunities for fast-track access for small projects without strict due date for applications
The infrastructure provider of the EUMETSAT side of the EWC announced an upcoming scheduled maintenance window that will be taking place on 04 April 2024 between 10:00 and 14:00 CEST, where they will be updating some network switches to improve stability.
Fortunately machines connected to these switches can and will be migrated prior to the maintenance, therefore no impact is expected on any services or VMs. We're informing you just for awareness/transparency, and to simplify any debugging in the event of an unexpected issue.
In case of any questions or comments, please contact us via the support (https://jira.ecmwf.int/servicedesk/customer/portal/9/) or via Rocket.
The European Weather Cloud (EWC) teams at ECMWF and EUMETSAT are pleased to invite you to the second thematic EWC webinar of 2024.
These recurring thematic webinars are aimed at new or prospective users of the EWC service which is available to all ECMWF and EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating States. Our primary objective is to provide guidance to users on how to effectively use the different capabilities of the EWC.
While the previous introductory webinars focused on the basics to get you started (you can find more information, including the video recordings, here and here), in this series we explore various aspects of cloud utilization through examples, with a specific emphasis on key functionalities and cloud skills.
This upcoming webinar will take place on 23 April 2024 at 8:00 UTC, and will be about Using Jupyter on the EWC to interact with ECMWF datasets. If you would like to attend, we kindly ask you to register here. We will alert you of your acceptance to the webinar and send you all the joining information and Microsoft Teams meeting details in due course.
Throughout this webinar, we will guide you through the step-by-step process of spinning up your personalized Jupyter instance on the cloud including the provisioning of the virtual infrastructure required, as well as how to automate the deployment of the necessary software stack with ansible and git.
Once our Jupyter platform is up and running, we will explore various examples illustrating how to work with ECMWF datasets. From downloading and processing data to visualizing insights in an interactive manner, this webinar aims to equip you with additional tools and knowledge needed to leverage the power of the European Weather Cloud to access your favorite weather and climate datasets.
By the end of this 1-hour session, participants will have learnt about how to automate the provisioning of a cloud service such as Jupyter as well as familiarized themselves with different tools to access the ECMWF Data Services portfolio.
Dear all,
EUMETSAT's EWC infrastructure has a maintenance window planned on 25th March 2024 between 20:00 and 00:00 CET to upgrade NVIDIA GPU drivers and licenses.
VMs with GPUs plans (vm.a6000.x) will be restarted during the maintenance. We recommend our users with active processing/services running on the VMs to gracefully stop their active workloads on the VMs before the maintenance. The deployed VMs will remain unchanged (i.e. CUDA and NVIDIA driver versions will remain the same).
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and as always in case of any questions or comments or issues, please contact us via support (https://jira.ecmwf.int/servicedesk/customer/portal/9/) or via Rocket.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Dear !
We are pleased to announce that EWC users can now provision Rocky linux 9 at both ECMWF and EUMETSAT side of the cloud.
Ubuntu 22 and Rocky 8 have been also updated, so when you deploy new images with these layouts, you will get latest updates pre-applied.
As always, if you need any support, please do get in touch with us on rocketchat or through the European Weather Cloud Support Portal.
Kind regards,
EWC Team
The European Weather Cloud (EWC) teams at ECMWF and EUMETSAT are pleased to invite you to the upcoming thematic EWC webinar series in 2024, following the two successful introductory webinars held last year (you can find more information, including the video recordings, here and here). These recurring thematic webinars are aimed at new or prospective users of the EWC service, provided by EUMETSAT and ECMWF, which is available to all ECMWF and EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating States. Our primary objective is to provide guidance to users on how to effectively use the different capabilities of the EWC.
The first webinar of this new series will take place on 21 March 2024 at 9 UTC, and will be about using the EWC to download data from the EUMETSAT Data Access Services. If you would like to attend, we kindly ask you to register here. We will alert you of your acceptance to the webinar and send you all the joining information and Microsoft Teams meeting details in due course.
In this webinar, participants will explore various aspects of cloud utilisation, with a specific emphasis on key functionalities such as provisioning and configuring virtual machines. Furthermore, we will explore how to access the EUMETSAT data catalogue made available through the Data Access Services, more precisely, using the EUMETSAT Data Access Client. Additionally, we will show the utilization of the pre-installed application, Data Tailor, which offers customization options, enabling users to tailor datasets according to their requirements and preferences.
By the end of this 1-hour session, participants will not only have gained valuable insights into the operational dynamics of the EWC, but will also possess the practical skills needed to navigate the EUMETSAT Data Access Services.
Additional webinars on different topics are planned in April and June, so stay tuned for more information!
dear @all,
EUMETSAT side of the EWC announced an upcoming scheduled maintenance window that will be taking place on 28 February 2024 between 10:00 and 12:00 CET. This maintenance is required to migrate connection to a new more performant firewall
During the maintenance works, no downtime is expected, as the traffic will be redirected through the Internet.
In case of any questions or comments or issues, please contact us via support (https://jira.ecmwf.int/servicedesk/customer/portal/9/) or via Rocket.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Dear Users,
We want to inform you that CentOS 7 support has been discontinued at EUMETSAT side of EWC, as anticipated previously. This decision is based on security concerns and the need to transition to a more secure and supported operating system. We have now migrated to Rocky Linux 8 and Ubuntu 22.
Reasons for the Change:
1. Security Updates: CentOS 7 will no longer receive security updates after June 2024, posing a potential risk to server security.
2. Compatibility: The lack of ongoing updates may lead to compatibility issues with newer software and technologies.
3. Enhanced Features: Transitioning allows us to benefit from enhanced features, improved performance, and regular security updates provided by the latest software releases.
Existing CentOS 7 installations will remain unaffected at this time. However, we strongly advise users to consider migrating their externally exposed VMs to Rocky Linux 8 or Ubuntu 22 by June 2024 to ensure continued security and support. For users with VMs on the internal network only, there's no immediate urgency to migrate. However, if you require assistance or advice on migration, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.
Additionally, we're working on updating all templates and blueprints provided by EWC to reflect these changes.
If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.
We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we work towards a more secure server environment.
Thank you, EWC Team
Modified on 9 Feb 2024: Updated new time and refined the impact a bit
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The infrastructure provider of the EUMETSAT side of the EWC announced an upcoming scheduled maintenance window that will be taking place on 21 February 2024 between 09:00 and 17:00 CET.
During the maintenance works, there may be temporary (up to several hours) interruptions of certain components, which may result in:
- inability to manage cloud resources (e.g., deploy new VMs or remove / re-configure old ones),
- disruptions in virtual network (e.g., inability to access the VMs from the internet, broken communication among VMs through internal networks, broken access from VMs to the storage),
While there is a possibility for longer interruption, in the nominal case the impact will affect only from seconds to a few minutes.
In case of any questions or comments, please contact us via support.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience and understanding.
Dear ,
Happy new year!
Today 04.01.2024 we plan to update EWC Rocketchat starting from 15:30 AM CET. The process should take around 1h.
During the maintenance period, rocketchat could be not accessible or not available.
This maintenance is aiming to improve the performance of rocketchat, bring new features and security updates. We are doing it on short notice to catchup with updates over the Christmas period and to have the platform up to date before most of the users are back to EWC.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
EWC team
Dear EWC users!
HTC batch processing service is now available on EUM side of EWC. It is currently in beta testing. This service is available as best effort for testing. Be aware when trying this service.
You can find the description of the service here: EUMETSAT - HTC batch processing
It's based on HTCondor. Users can deploy execute nodes and submit nodes in their tenancies and join a common pool of resources. There is a simple example to start with, to customize your processing scripts. All workloads run as containers. The example also show how to create a container that you can submit to HTCondor.
Kind regards,
EWC Team
Dear all,
Tomorrow 07.11.2023 we plan to update EWC Rocketchat starting from 10:00 AM CET. The process should take around 1h.
During the maintenance period, rocketchat could be not accessible or not available.
This maintenance is aiming to improve the performance of rocketchat, bring new features and security updates.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
EWC team
The European Weather Cloud (EWC) teams at ECMWF and EUMETSAT are pleased to invite you to two upcoming EWC introductory webinars in November.
These webinars are aimed at new or prospective users of the EWC service, which is available to ECMWF and EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating States. Focusing on the basics to get you started, these webinars will show you around our cloud portal Morpheus, which should give you a taste of the features available and how to carry out the main operations, including deployment of instances, using the object store, and simple automation.
The two introductory webinars will be similar in content but each of them will focus on a particular side of the EWC - either ECMWF or EUMETSAT - and cover information specific to each host.
If that sounds interesting to you, you may register to one of the two 1-hour webinars based on your focus:
- ECMWF focused - Tuesday 21 November 2023 09:00 - 10:00 UTC
- EUMETSAT focused - Tuesday 28 November 2023 09:00 - 10:00 UTC
You will find the registration form in the left-hand side menu of the pages above. We will alert you of your acceptance to the webinar and send you all the joining information and Microsoft Teams meeting details in due course.
Please note that these webinars are open to anyone from an ECMWF or EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating State, and will be conducted in English.