High Volume METOC Chart Production Using Beowulf Technology

Since the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW), there has been an ever increasing demand for quick access to prepared information in all areas within the civilian and military sectors. The Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Monterey, California, has been successful in exploiting the WWW to effect the timely delivery of current and forecasted weather information to its customers around the globe. This paper describes the design and implementation of a WWW based system to deliver user selected regions of interest and graphical products which are produced with Beowulf-class computing technology, resulting in supercomputer performance at an order of magnitude lower cost.