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
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