Obtain the required hardware

In this chapter, we provide information about the computer equipment that you will need in order to run HEMCO in standalone mode (aka the HEMCO standalone).

Computer system requirements

Before you can run HEMCO standalone, you will need to have one the following items.

  1. A Unix/Linux based computer system, OR:

  2. An account on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform.

If your institution has computational resources (e.g. a shared computer cluster with many cores, sufficient disk storage and memory), then you can run HEMCO standalone there. Contact your IT staff for assistance.

If your institution lacks computational resources (or if you need additional computational resources beyond what is available), then you should consider signing up for access to the Amazon Web Services cloud. Using the cloud has the following advantages:

  1. You can run HEMCO standalone without having to invest in local hardware and maintenance personnel.

  2. You won’t have to download any meteorological fields or emissions data. All of the necessary data input for HEMCO standalone will be available on the cloud.

  3. You can initialize your computational environment with all of the required software (e.g. compilers,libraries, utilities) that you need for HEMCO standalone.

  4. Your runs will be 100% reproducible, because you will initialize your computational environment the same way every time.

  5. You will avoid compilation errors due to library incompatibilities.

  6. You will be charged for the computational time that you use, and if you download data off the cloud.

Memory and disk requirements

If you plan to run HEMCO standalone on a local computer system, please make sure that your system has sufficient memory and disk space.

We would recommend at least 4 GB of RAM to run HEMCO standalone. However, if you will be reading data sets at very fine horizional resolution, you will want to increase the memory to perhaps 20-30 GB/RAM.

Also make sure that you have enough disk space to store the amount of input data for your HEMCO standalone simulations.