AUTOMOTIVE

The Southern Region Dissemination Enhancement Team required a system capable of dynamically processing vast amounts of data to support some of its most heavily used applications. One such application is Graphical Point Forecast (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/), which allows end users to click on any point on a map and get information about current weather and hour-by-hour forecasts for those areas selected. The NWS Southern Region averages 15 million hits per day, five million of which are for forecasts. The National Weather Service radar pages are the most popular. The application requires intensive back-end processing to translate the data from the Channel Definition Format (CDF) format into HTML on-the-fly. Penguin's Altus cluster is able to do this quickly and easily so the team can deliver accurate information to the public in a timely, easy-to-use format. "Compute intensive and enterprise customers are increasingly relying on our Linux clustering solutions because they deliver the power of traditional UNIX systems at a fraction of the price. When combined with Scyld Beowulf, these systems are easier to deploy and manage than any alternative Linux cluster offering available," said Enrico Pesatori, chairman and C.E.O., Penguin Computing. "This kind of solution takes the pain away from high performance computing and puts our customers more in control, so they are able to deliver a better service to their customers." The Penguin Altus cluster also supports some of the team's most important internal applications such as weather map generation. Using the cluster, the team tracks and generates hourly updates of weather patterns for a map covering the areas between Albuquerque, N.M. and San Juan, Puerto Rico (http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/). The Scyld Beowulf software's single system installation and administration allows the team to minimize time spent on managing and administering its system. The ability to load and update Linux once on the master node saves time and ensures the cluster is running consistent versions of Linux, preventing software version skews.