[chomp]

Weather modeling - X kilometers by Y layers of atmosphere can get expensive to compute really quick. And NOAA does more than just simulate weather, they're running climate/sea level rise/arctic ice modelling, aggregating sensor data from buoys/balloons/satellites, processing maps, and more.

I can't speak for NOAA, but my experience with supercomputing has been that there is no abstraction of computation, your workload is very much tied to hardware assumptions.

[irfn]

In my experience it's very hard to write code for parallel compute workloads and I am guessing that half of the code written would be creating abstractions about that.