The existing Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) workstation hardware has been operational for nearly 5 years. As operational data volumes have increased, performance problems, or "high resource utilizations" have been identified as important factors to address. To address these problems, the National Weather Service (NWS) is investigating the use of the open source Linux technology and high performance Personal Computer (PC) hardware. The NWS plans to use high performance Intel microprocessor based, PC hardware running the Linux operating system. The port of the AWIPS workstation software to the Linux platform is intended to help solve the performance problems by supplementing, and then later replacing, the existing graphics workstations with new versions having an order of magnitude more processing power and speed. The increased performance of the Linux PC based workstations enables the NWS to port new software not able to run efficiently on the existing five year old Hewlett-Packard workstations.

During the 90 day period, from May through July 2001, the AWIPS Linux Demonstration was conducted to provide NWS management with information about the installation process and the operational performance, impact, and reliability of the new hardware and software. The AWIPS Linux workstation features include all of the Display Two Dimensions (D2D) software (version 5.1.1 alpha), the Warning Generation (WarnGen) software, and the Graphical Forecast Editor (GFE) Suite. It did not include SCAN, the Product Maker, the Watch/Warning/Advisory (WWA) functions and text editing capabilities. Future builds will add these other capabilities.

This paper will summarize the conduct of the AWIPS Linux Demonstration and discuss evaluation results including the maintenance of the system and the forecasters' impressions of the AWIPS Linux workstation system.