SBIR-STTR Award

The AWIPS (Advanced Weather Information Processing System) program is a cornerstone element supporting NWS' mission to protect life and property and enhance the national economy. The challenge of this project is to help NWS harness large amounts of unused computer resources and underutilized data, improve collaboration and cooperation to solve complex problems not currently addressable, to increase budget efficiencies, and improve disaster preparedness and homeland security. Fairfield Technologies Inc. (FTI) will design and build an AW IPS-based grid, and related weather data management ontology, so NWS local and regional offices and national centers can pool systems resources to address large computational problems relating to NWS' mission, provide greater access to local data, utilize existing system resources to the greatest extent possible, providing more results from the same budget, and provide NOAA with greatly expanded options for business continuity planning, supporting improved recovery from natural disasters or national security threats. FTI will iteratively specify, architect, design, build, and test AWIPS grid and ontology prototypes. Taking maximum advantage of current, worldwide state-of-the-art grid architecture research efforts, open-source software projects, and its own AWIPS data knowledge, FTI will provide NOAA a fast, reliable, robust processing capability compatible with rapidly advancing technology and still-evolving standards. Summary of

Anticipated Results:
Phase 1- Determine the technical feasibility of building an AWIPS-based grid for sharing data and computational resources, and of a weather-related ontology facilitating global information reuse and sharing. Phase 2 - Validation of working AWIPS grid and ontology prototypes. Phase 3 and beyond - An operational AWIPS-based grid that can be scaled to broad NOAA usage, plus a detailed ontology or knowledge model for organizing, analyzing, using, sharing, and presenting weather-related information.

Potential Commercial Applications:
Development of pre-packaged, out-of-the-box grid software, implementation and training support. Outsourced grid hosting, facilities management, or business continuity/disaster recovery services. Development of grid-specific applications for functions such as weather forecasting, financial analysis and forecasting, bioinformatics modeling for drug and vaccine development, and Homeland Security-focused bio-defense applications in the areas of genetic, genomic, and proteomic analysis

Brief Description of Problem: NOAA’s AWIPS is a cornerstone of NWS’ forecast mission. As advanced as AWIPS is, it still faces challenges similar to many systems, including: system capacity over-/under-utilization; data and analysis stovepiping; and complex data management needs. Innovations: In Phase 1, FTI successfully demonstrated that grid computing and ontologies could enable communications between AWIPS computer systems. FTI will leverage this success to exploit the commercial potential of this innovation in Phase 2. FTI’s approach is innovative in that it: applies grid computing to mainstream government needs; employs an innovative open source software business model; and builds upon FTI’s standards-based software development "best practices." Project Objectives: FTI’s objective is to build a working prototype "Grid In A Box" product to address NOAA’s need for easier-to-use high performance computing options both within and outside of AWIPS. FTI will then refine this product for targeted marketing to government and commercial sectors. Technical Approach: FTI’s working prototype will consist of the following components, built on open source/open architecture software: the core "Grid In a Box" product; a supporting proprietary toolkit for non-grid experts; and an online product sales and delivery portal. FTI will validate prototype performance in a "real world" NOAA environment.

Potential Commercial Applications:
Development of pre-packaged, "out-of-the-box" grid software, implementation and training support. Outsourced grid hosting, facilities management, or business continuity/disaster recovery services. Development of grid-specific applications for functions such as weather forecasting, financial analysis and forecasting, bioinformatics modeling for drug and vaccine development, and Homeland Security-focused bio-defense applications in the areas of genetic, genomic, and proteomic analysis