NCEP Central Operations Capabilities

“Where America’s Climate, Weather, Ocean, and Space Prediction Services Begin”

Brent GordonNCEP/NCO/Systems Integration Branch

NextGen System of Systems WorkshopOctober 7, 2009

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NCO Mission• Execute the NCEP operational model suite

– Create climate, weather, ocean and environmental hazard products

• Manage improvements to the NCEP model suite and supporting infrastructure– Model enhancements, other infrastructure

• Develop meteorological software– Used by the NCEP Centers to create forecaster generated

products

• Manage the flow of data and products– To and from the NCEP centers, partners, and customers

• We pride ourselves in delivering the goods on time and all of the time

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NCEP Operational Model Suite

• NCO executes a world-class suite of operational models– 20 model runs per day– 4 to 24 different cycles per day

• Models span a wide spectrum, including: – Seasonal– Global – Ocean– Regional – Hurricane– Hazard

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OCCS Capability

– 69.7 Teraflops Linpack• #36 Top 500 Nov 2008

– 156 Power6 32-way Nodes

– 4,992 processors @ 4.7GHz

– 19,712 gigabytes memory

– 170 terabytes of disk space

– 100 terabyte tape archive

Two Identical IBM Power6 Systems

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Network Diagram

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NCEP Compute Farm

• Compute capacity available outside of OCCS• Runs smaller scale applications than OCCS• 30 Blade system – Running VMWare

– 8 cores (processors) per blade– 32 GB Ram per blade (960 GB total)– 36 TB total Disk Space

• Currently at NCEP WWB– Will move to the NCWCP in College Park

• A offsite back-up is being developed in Fairmont, WV at this time

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Supported Standards/Formats

• NCEP adheres to WMO standards– GRIB, BUFR, CREX formats are primary

• NetCDF is supported as well– Limited support– NCO concern about lack of standards

• Fortran is predominant language on CCS– However C, C++, Java, Python are all used and

supported by NCO• We can support just about any standard

– Must have a strong, solid business case– Must have continued backing of the development

organization

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Road to Operations

• Solid CONOPS and Test plans are a must• Applications using NCEP model data as primary

input should be developed with the NCEP OCCS architecture in mind– Numerous standalone systems not a good business

model

• Must preserve our 99.9% on time delivery rate– Applications must be robust and failsafe– Proper documentation a requirement