Harnessing the spare computing power
of NOAA Office PCs for improved satellite data processing and
technology transition
Ingrid
Guch
Office of Systems Development, NESDIS
NOAA
Office PCs are currently processing satellite data during normally
idle time as part of an HPCC-funded demonstration project. Typically
office PCs are idle more than 80% of each week, providing a large
untapped computing resource for NOAA.
The
operational processing centers that work to exploit the utilization
of satellite data can leverage the use of their office PCs to
take advantage of these computational resources in order to meet
the spatial, temporal and timeliness requirements of users. In
this demonstration project, satellite data processing occurs securely
and transparently on each participating office's PCs. Satellite
data processing begins as soon as data is made available and at
least one of the participating PCs has been identified by the
system as idle.
A single executable is copied to a designated partition on the
idle PC along with needed input data access. Once the job has
completed the processed information is copied back to the serving
node. In the current demonstration project 7 PCs process 160 jobs
per day. Security related and other patches are automatically
updated across the participating nodes. All files are scanned
for viruses.
Up to 120 Office PCs in the Information Processing Division at
the Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution can be
added to this system which runs on a stand-alone Windows 2000
domain. The hardware, operating system and maintenance of NOAA
Office PC's are already paid for, leading to significant cost-savings
both in the short term (hardware purchases) and in the long term
(staff hours for maintenance and upgrades) when compared to an
equivalent cluster of dedicated machines. A Total Cost of Ownership
(TCO) model indicates these savings exceed $2000 per Office PC
per year. Future work will assess the technology transfer improvements
from the system, and quantify the additional related cost savings
to NOAA.
