The National Weather Service (NWS) Central Operations (NCO) has a goal to transition its supercomputer from the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS) to an upgraded HPC architecture, WCOSS2 by 2022. This would expand computing power by 200% for improved resolution and double routine ingests to 270 GB and disseminations to 5 TB daily – over 5,000 nodes. IBSS supports this effort by producing necessary testing, implementation documentation, software development, and data management. We provide 24×7 monitoring and user support, develop high-performance software codes, update NECP as new models and software become available, and offer debugging and integration testing, reporting, and documentation for real-time operations.
We work with NWS partners to capture new rate-limiting schemes and complete High Water Mark project development charts. These charts display supercomputer resource usage over the more than 30 models and major applications across air, water, and space. Further, as the NWS’ Akamai provider, we facilitate weather.gov in handling traffic surges using forecast data, watches, and warning. Our solution saved 50% data center capacity during severe weather by moving operational web content traffic from on-premise, web-farms to the cloud.