The US Air Force Weather and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new high-performance weather forecasting computer system that will provide a platform for some of the most advanced weather modeling in the world. The computing systems are specifically designed to provide fully redundant and highly available services supporting numerical weather prediction (NWP) requirements of the US Department of Defense.
Procured and managed by the National Center for Computational Sciences, the system comprises two Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HPE, Cray EX supercomputers, collectively known as System 11. The two supercomputers have been dubbed “Fawbush” and “Miller” after Air Force meteorologists Maj. Ernest Fawbush and Capt. Robert Miller, who made the first operational tornado forecast in history at Tinker Air Force Base in 1948. In addition, redundant file systems provide stable and high-performance storage for the continuous receipt of updated boundary conditions for the weather models.
