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Meet-a-Member: Listen to NOAA's Darren Smith
In order to better monitor hurricanes and more accurately predict daily weather, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated that it needed 6,500 times its current compute power to do so. That feat fell squarely in the lap of NOAA IT Specialist Darren Smith, who shared his project challenges during AFCOM’s latest Meet-a-Member webinar.
Today, the government agency is just months from putting the final touches on its $30 million, 54,000 square foot facility in Fairmont, WV. Funded as a result of the federal Recovery Act, a $38 million supercomputer with 29,000 cores and 383 teraflops of power, serves as the heart of the NOAA’s Southeast data center.
Taking the most cost-effective approach to developing the massive facility, Smith and his team concluded that leasing an existing building over 20 years made the most economic sense for meeting NOAA’s four key requirements:
• Petaflop-scale compute power.
• Five megawatts of electricity and the ability to expand to 10 within the next couple of years.
• Internet access at 10-gigabytes per second.
• No more than a 4-hour drive from Washington D.C.
To find out the steps Smith and the NOAA took since “breaking ground” back in March 2009 to an opening ribbon ceremony set for as early as this fall, click here to be redirected to the Meet-a-Member interview.
For a complete archive of the Meet-a-Member program, visit the Digital Library.