The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) GWAR team has successfully containerized NOAA’s Global-Workflow (GW). This achievement enables the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Weather Model to run seamlessly across diverse computing environments, from on-premises supercomputers (Gaea-C6, Ursa) to commercial cloud platforms, dramatically simplifying setup and accelerating the transition from Research to Operations and Operations to Research (R2O2R). EPIC adopted a state-of-the-art containerization strategy, using Docker to build the container image and Singularity (currently Apptainer) to run the containerized GW. A container image functions like a computational shipping container, packaging operating system (Ubuntu), intel compiler, and software dependencies (Spack Stack) into a single, self-contained unit. The performance of the containerized GW was evaluated against its non-containerized legacy counterpart using the C48-ATM and C768-S2S model configurations across High Performance Computing Systems (HPCSs) and cloud platforms (see Table 1). C48-ATM is an ~100 km horizontal resolution atmosphere only model configuration whereas C768-S2S is an ~13km horizontal resolution Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) model configuration fully coupled with atmosphere, ocean, ice, and wave components. A key demonstration on the Ursa supercomputer confirmed that the containerized workflow can be executed using only a job scheduler (Slurm), provided that a container runtime (e.g. Singularity) is pre-installed and the container image is accessible from the host machine. The Containerized GW demonstrated comparable performance on both Gaea-C6 and Ursa and active testing is currently underway on both Ursa and AWS to further evaluate performance, portability, and reproducibility of containerized GW. EPIC conducted a hybrid training session for the UFS community at the Unifying Innovations in Forecasting Capabilities Workshop (UIFCW25) on September 8, 2025 in Boulder, Colorado, with virtual attendance options. More information about the training is available at https://epic.noaa.gov/eventsposts/uifcw-2025/.
