Debian Cluster Replaces Supercomputer For Weather Forecasting

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday March 13, 2008 @06:04PM 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."

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Debian? by Brian+Gordon · 2008-03-13 18:13 · Score: -1, Troll

Why Debian? A desktop distro? That's got to be one of the least scalable and cluster-friendly distros. If they would invest a little to set things up properly they could get a lot more performance out of their machines.