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Debian Cluster Replaces Supercomputer For Weather Forecasting

Posted by Soulskill on from the when-it-rains-it-pours dept.

wazza brings us a story about the Philippine government's weather service (PAGASA), which has recently used an eight-PC Debian cluster to replace an SGI supercomputer. The system processes data from local sources and the Global Telecommunication System, and it has reduced monthly operational costs by a factor of 20. Quoting: "'We tried several Linux flavours, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora etc,' said Alan Pineda, head of ICT and flood forecasting at PAGASA. 'It doesn't make a dent in our budget; it's very negligible.' Pineda said PAGASA also wanted to implement a system which is very scalable. All of the equipment used for PICWIN's data gathering comes off-the-shelf, including laptops and mobile phones to transmit weather data such as temperature, humidity, rainfall, cloud formation and atmospheric pressure from field stations via SMS into PAGASA's central database."

2 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. One thing always missing from such stories... by dhavleak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What was the age and the specs of the SGI being replaced?

    Going by Moore's law, a factor of 20 performance improvement takes about 6 to 8 years. If the SGI was at least that old, this isn't news -- it's just the state of the art these days. In other words, small clusters capable of weather forcasting are relatively run-of-the-mill.

    Of course, props to linux for being the enabler in this case.

  2. This isn't anything new... by toby34a · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Most weather prediction centers have adapted their weather forecast models to use Linux clusters. By running an operational forecast model on a cluster, it's easy for forecasters to scale the models so that they can be run (albeit slowly) on desktop machines, and are easily worked on by real meteorologists (versus IT professionals). At my university, we use a large cluster of machines on a RedHat enterprise system, and then able to scale the models and run them on multiple processors using MPICH compilers and batch jobs. Really, using a Debian cluster is no different then using a RedHat cluster. My colleague has access to the NOAA machine, which has more processors then you can shake a stick at... he talks about some code that takes 3 days to run on his personal workstation that takes 2 minutes on 40 processors. With the relatively low cost of a linux cluster, weather forecasting models can be run quickly and efficiently on numerous processors at a local level. With the ease of use of a Linux machine versus some of the supercomputers, it puts the power in the meteorologists to make those changes to the model so that it can improve forecasts.