Thank you for asking. What I understood from my abortive attempt on VirtualBox was that given a big enough internal drive, running SMOKE (tested for the 12km national grid) was feasible since the Linux directory structure of SMOKE would remain intact. I could not determine whether I would get the same results using a VM on an external USB drive.
From WSL webpages I’ve read and videos I’ve watched, it appears that WSLv1 translates Linux operations to Windows equivalents so it could conceivably handle running SMOKE and saving output files on an external USB drive, as long as the files were not subjected to any Windows operations.
I’m looking for a temporary solution so we can keep working with SMOKE while the CMAS training is fresh in our minds. We do have a Linux cluster with an older version of SMOKE, but something went wrong during a Dell hardware upgrade in February and we had to shut it down as a preventive measure.
My colleague and I are new to SMOKE/CAMx so our short term goal is to generate a 2022 run and compare our results with the EPA platform.