Summary

For the past two years, Fairfield Technologies Inc. has been performing advanced scientific grid computing R&D for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce.

The AWIPS (Advanced Weather Information Processing System) program provides integrated data and analysis capabilities for a network of sophisticated local, regional, and national offices dedicated to timely and accurate weather analyses, forecasts and warnings. FTI’s initial research objective was to demonstrate the technical feasibility of grid computing within the NOAA environment by building and validating working "proof of concept" prototypes of a computational grid for sharing AWIPS data and computational resources (as well as an AWIPS-compatible, weather-related ontology to integrate a wide variety of weather-related information and facilitate its sharing and re-use).

During the initial phase, FTI demonstrated that it was feasible, practical, and economical for NOAA to utilize recent advances in grid computing and ontology technologies to meet its complex and challenging mission, and:

Applications

• Using a computational grid greatly improves AWIPS processing performance
  
  
• Globus-based grid software was a sound choice for an AWIPS-based grid
  
  
• FTI’s open source/common standards approach for grid implementation have tremendous advantages - particularly free licensing, rapid development time, smoother integration, and the opportunity to leverage a large body of advanced government and commercially-funded research - but is not a perfect solution
  
  
• Knowledge, experience and "best practices" are still key to implementation success. Grid computing is still a new endeavor; even "established" products change regularly and therefore continual monitoring of the research and technical environment is a must.

Under the scenarios studied, grid computing could provide NOAA with benefits of better system utilization, improved collaboration and cooperation, and increased budget efficiencies.

Fairfield Technologies’ objective for the next project phase is to build a working prototype grid product for NOAA to address the need for easier-to-use grid-based supercomputing products, both within the AWIPS environment, as well as elsewhere within the National Weather Service or other organizations within NOAA.