ECMWF's AI forecasting model is open source: now let's make it easy to run.

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Authors: Emma Scharfmann (Hugging Face), Harrison Cook (ECMWF)

Making models open source is great, but if there's a lot of friction to actually running them, it doesn't make them very accessible to the community. So this post explores how we can close that gap: not just making models open source, but also easier to run. ECMWF had the same goal when they open-sourced their new AI models, AIFS, and this blog is the result of our work together to make that happen.

AIFS is ECMWF's AI weather forecasting model, delivering medium-range global forecasts using roughly 1,000 times less energy than traditional physics-based models. The weights are on Hugging Face, available for anyone to use.

But running the current model requires a specific GPU (>Ampere-class), which most people don't have lying around. So we built a compatibility patch to run it on any device. This post walks through how to run AIFS Single 2.0 yourself, using Hugging Face Jobs or your own hardware.