NWS getting out of commodity IT through cloud, shared services

Grazed from FederalNewsRadio. Author: Jason Miller.

The National Weather Service recently migrated its high performance computing to a new capability in a private cloud. Instead of running its own hardware and software, NWS moved to a managed service from IBM under a $19 million-a-year contract. "We have more than doubled our capacity from 90 terabytes to about 213 terabytes a second.

This is potentially a game-changer what we are looking at to be able to provide better services," said Iftikhar Jamil, the associate chief information officer for weather at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "We want to be able to do complex computations at a much faster rate, and this is the capability that will provide more accuracy, higher fidelity and in a faster processing time so people will see the results faster."…

Jamil, whose position used to be known as the NWS CIO, said under the contract IBM will upgrade the high-performance computing capabilities every two-and-a-half years. Moving high-performance computing to the cloud is one of several technology capabilities that the weather service is upgrading. Jamil said NWS is part of the broader Commerce Department effort to move commodity IT to shared services, many times run by bureaus with expertise in that specific area…

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