Linux To Power NWS's Storm Prediction System

Mr. Plow writes "The National Weather Service is migrating to Linux-based IBM workstations and has purchased 900 IBM computers and 160 servers to do so." He includes links to coverage at Forbes (a Reuters wire service story there), Government Computer News, and Computerworld.

Comments

Bravo

[enodev]

Now I'll now 185 seconds earlier that a flash just struck my home :-).

The previous systems contained Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC processors with clock speeds ranging from 100 to 120 MHz. Although those specifications aren't directly comparable to the 2.4-GHz clock speeds of the dual Intel Pentium 4 Xeon processors, the new workstations, which have 2G of RAM each, run the various AWIPS applications noticeably faster than their predecessors, Piercy said.

For instance, one AWIPS app that used to take more than 60 seconds to start up now loads in 18 seconds, he said.

That's a increase of about 48 times of computing power and the app just loads 3 times that fast? Something has to be seriously wrong with this setup!

Interesting

[frankthechicken]

Interesting, according to this

Linux first appeared on the NWS scene in 1995 in the form of Slackware

And in comparison to their previous HP-UX systems:-

. . .the switch has helped increase data processing speed.

"The performance that we measure with our benchmark has increased by over 100% since we completed phase one of our Linux migration," happily boasts Piercy.

Re:Interesting

[4of12]

That's the key issue.

The purchase price of high performance RISC machines has always been O(US$10^4) and the acquisition cycle a period of several years.

While you can still get high performance RISC workstations for those prices, it doesn't make any sense when comparing price/performance.

In 1993, PC's significantly underperformed RISC machines, so paying 5-8 times the prices was worth it.

In 2003, PC's perform equitably to the best RISC workstations: you need a really good reason not get a really great Linux workstation for $6-8K instead of high-end RISC hardware for $20-100K.

So what's the forecast?

[trystanu]

Unsettled weather for the duration of the migration?

Are forecasts really getting better as computer power increases? I know that Metrology is always in need of more computer cycles to model the weather, but have forecasts actually improved with this power? Are there any success statistics around?

Linux replacing Unix : just standard evolution

[slb]

What would have been far more interesting is a Windows to Linux migration with the same improvement in performance and TCO.

Maybe this will help Linux's respectability

[Maestro4k]

Having someone big and respected like the NWS using Linux and announcing it publically should help Linux's respectability quotient in the US a lot. I'm glad to see this happening, both because it increases Linux's usage out there, and because it'll save us money (IIRC, the NWS is taxpayer funded), and probably lead to more accurate forecasts. It seems every time the computers they use get faster/more powerful, the forecasts get better. :)

lies

[n0k14]

Almost every day I read about a department, agency, company or even country switching to linux. I rarely read about switching from linux back to windows. Where is this inconceivebly high implementation and training cost for linux that micosoft keeps whining about?

Why not using distributed.net...

[Ummite]

Why not using free systems like distributed.net, wich is 1) more powerfull and 2) free. People would be glad to help predict better weather, since actually they can't predict correctly 24h in advance ....