Case Study: Weather Forecasting in the Cloud

Weather It Is, LTD, is using Advanced Clustering Technology’s ACTnowHPC on-demand cloud high performance computing cluster to forecast potentially severe winter snowstorms, including storms like the one that threatens the East Coast Jan. 22-24th.

Weather It Is makes high resolution forecasts to maximize forecast accuracy. Areas of research include numerical modeling of severe storms and lightning, the impact of greenhouse gases on climate, and the effect of aerosols on precipitation and hurricane development.

Challenges Faced Before Moving to the Cloud
Before Weather It Is started using ACTnowHPC, the company faced a lack of availability on its own HPC cluster, where the forecasters were running various Fortran codes and running on about 150 cores every day. Weather It Is needed something reliable that fit the budget and offered full technical support.

“We chose the ACTnowHPC system because it offers reliability and quick turn-around times without the headaches of owning and managing your own system,” said Weather It Is CEO Barry Lynn. “Set-up was easy. We mirrored our own high powered computing system on the HPC cloud system and adapted our programs that had already been running on our internal system.”

Benefits of Working on the Cloud
Weather It Is has experienced greater flexibility in scheduling and completing jobs since starting on ACTnowHPC. “On our current system, we can run just three large jobs at the same time. On ACTnowHPC, we’ve more than tripled our productivity with even faster turn-around time job-per-job than on our own system.”