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Government agency will use Google Cloud H4D VMs to replace HPE Cray machines:
Uncle Sam will no longer be hosting his own supercomputers to predict the weather. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has picked Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure for its weather forecasting operations.
In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to run on the commercial cloud, though the UK's Met Office is also in the process of moving its own weather prediction system to Microsoft Azure in a hybrid setup. Weather operations are typically run on in-house or government-funded supercomputer systems, which helps drive the HPC (high performance computing) market.
[...] The plan is to move NOAA's Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, run by the National Weather Service (NWS) division, over to the cloud by December 2027, along with the software that generates NWS weather data for analysis.
The agency is hoping that the cloud will make model forecasting more nimble, resulting in earlier predictions and better warnings for all the extreme weather events that seem to keep occurring these days. It was the in-house systems that were holding things back, evidently.
"Cloud-based high-performance computing will accelerate the transition of research into operations by eliminating traditional bottlenecks of on-premise systems," said NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs in a statement.
Jacobs noted that the cloud's flexibility for providing large amounts of compute is advantageous: the agency can ramp up cycles during tropical storm season, then wind them down during calmer periods.
[...] For the job, Google plans to use Google Cloud H4D VMs, built on AMD Epyc processors. Google labels these instances as "virtual machines" because they run under a hypervisor that integrates Google's networking and orchestration tools. As a result, they can be synchronized to run large jobs the same way supercomputers do.
According to Google, customers can access H4Ds for as low as 3 cents per core-hour without long-term commitments. For supercomputing jobs, they can also use Cluster Toolkit to deploy clusters and Cluster Director to maintain them. Google Cloud's Batch can handle the queuing, scheduling, and resource provisioning.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by datapharmer on Wednesday August 05, @02:57PM (2 children)
They did think this through. Why build and own when the taxpayers can pay their buddies indefinitely at whatever rate they want to charge. "Sorry, no weather forecast for you as you were preempted by another customer... unless you want to pay a premium rate perhaps for guaranteed capacity?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 05, @03:38PM (1 child)
There was a time (maybe even still today) when the US military paid commercial airlines for "as needed" use of their jumbo jets. They did things like outfit the floors for heavy cargo use (think: quick pull out all the seats from a 747 and use it to transport tanks...) and compensated the airlines for the privilege.
It _is possible_ for government (taxpayers) and industry to closely cooperate and provide the necessary services without either party being overly abused. Of course, this requires a certain amount of integrity in government...
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jb on Thursday August 06, @07:04AM
True. But it also requires a certain amount of integrity in the vendor.
That's probably a bigger sticking point. Governments change every few years, so there's at least a chance that some day your country might get one with integrity (after all, it has happened before).
On the other hand, Google only gets worse and worse every year: no chance at all of that mob ever being anything vaguely approaching trustworthy.