Silver Spring, MD, August 18, 2020 –(PR.com)– Axiom Consultants Inc. (Axiom) announces a bold approach to get out in front of a high performance computing (HPC) strategy by developing an independently funded prototype that demonstrates Axiom’s understanding of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) research-to-operations (R2O) weather prediction goals and strategies. In response to a major effort of advancing toward the NOAA Unified Forecast System (UFS) and the latest initiative of establishing the Earth Prediction and Innovation Center (EPIC), Axiom, for the first time ever, ported the four-way coupled UFS Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) weather forecast application to AWS cloud HPC that mimics the prototype coupled model developed on NOAA HPC. This is accomplished in a non-typical cloud-porting approach through constructing an identical computing environment in the cloud that prevents having to train scientists, and reduces technology maintenance to easier learn techniques that scientific programmers can quickly pick up.

Axiom’s approach is not a typical porting strategy for numerical weather models where HPC can be highly beneficial in collecting and processing massive amounts of data. A typical approach to porting weather applications to the cloud is to create advanced build systems and workflow systems to replace the original, rewrite the codes to fit on different cloud architectures, and deploy it using customized technologies. While there are merits to this approach, it makes scientists’ lives harder by forcing them to learn new technologies that won’t necessarily improve the science, such as improving hurricane track forecasts or improving the quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF). Additional drawbacks are having to transition between configurations that only exist on the cloud, and less flexible configurations used on on-premise HPC in operations, forces scientists to port back and forth any development to operations or vice-versa. This design is stuck in the pre-virtualization-era way of thinking. Cloud HPC provides numerous capabilities and has a wide range of flexibility that can be put to better use. This is why it is imperative to have a customer-focused design philosophy.