Rose/Cylc and FCM: workflow engine running meteorological suites

Rose/Cylc and FCM are software tools commonly used in the atmospheric and climate modeling community, particularly in the UK Met Office Unified Model (UM) community. They serve different purposes but are often used together in the modeling workflow.

• Rose/Cylc:

  • Rose: Rose is a suite management tool developed by the UK Met Office. It provides a user-friendly interface for configuring, running, and monitoring complex suites of scientific model simulations. Rose simplifies the setup of model runs by managing input files, directories, and dependencies.
  • Cylc: Cylc is a workflow engine designed to automate and manage the execution of scientific workflows. It allows users to define complex, cylc workflows using a human-readable configuration language. Cylc provides capabilities for task scheduling, dependency management, error handling, and task recovery.

• FCM (Flexible Configuration Manager):

  • FCM is a software tool developed by the UK Met Office to manage software configurations and build systems. It provides a flexible framework for managing code repositories, configuring software components, and building complex software systems. FCM supports version control systems like Subversion (SVN) and Git, and it allows users to manage dependencies, configurations, and build scripts efficiently.

The two modules "cylc7" and "cylc" provide bundles of above packages for users to run the workflows; cylc7 is based on python2, whereas cylc is based on python3.  At present cylc7 is more commonly used, but suites are progressively being created in cylc8.  We have provided examples of how to use Cylc7, and separately for how to use cylc (cylc8).

The current default module (cylc7 and cylc) is highlighted in bold in the table below, however these will update following testing of the latest release of the software.