High
Performance Computing at
Fleet
Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center
The Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and
Oceanography Center (FNMOC) produces numerical weather
prediction (NWP) products to meet the unique needs of the Navy and Marine
Corps. Mesoscale NWP models, with horizontal
spatial resolutions of less than 10 km, are a key part of this support and the
principal consumers of High Performance Computing (HPC) resources at
FNMOC. With the resolutions of these models being driven ever finer by
military requirements and scientific advances, they demand HPC performance on
the order of many TFLOPS peak computational rate and TB per day of data
throughput. To address these challenges, FNMOC has fielded a powerful
production environment involving a combination of SGI/TRIX and IBM/AIX HPC
platforms for number crunching, and an IBM/Linux solution for pre-processing,
post-processing and data distribution. FNMOC
is aggressively exploring opportunities afforded by remote operations
and grid computing to meet its burgeoning demand for HPC resources.