ECMWF is responsible for acquiring, organizing and analyzing recent meteorological observations to generate 10-day weather forecasts for the 25 European States that support ECMWF. These weather forecasts are essential to many business activities, such as routing oil tankers and cargo ships at sea, as well as demand planning for manufacturers and for gas and electricity utilities. The organization supplies meteorological information to national weather services, which issue weather warnings, present daily television weather forecasts throughout Europe and provide specialized services to their many government and commercial users.
The Evolocity II cluster will be used as a test bed for various aspects of ECMWF’s operational workload. Linux Networx successfully met ECMWF’s requirements for acceptance testing on June 18.
“Accurately predicting weather patterns requires massive amounts of computing power,†said Walter Zwieflhofer, head of operations for ECMWF. “The Linux Networx cluster provides impressive performance capabilities and ECMWF is excited about the potential of this technology.â€
ECMWF’s Evolocity II cluster consists of 64 AMD Opteron 2.2 GHz processors, 128 GB of memory and uses InfiniBand high-speed interconnects from Mellanox. The cluster also includes cluster management tools from Linux Networx, Clusterworx and Icebox, to provide total cluster management from one interface.
“We are delighted by ECMWF’s choice of Linux Networx as a partner to test their operational codes in a Linux cluster environment,†said Fabio Gallo, vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa operations for Linux Networx. “We are committed to serving the needs of the most demanding production-oriented supercomputing centers, and are confident we can meet ECMWF’s requirements for reliable, effective and easy-to-manage cluster computing systems.—
