NOAA, Microsoft partner to put climate models in the clouds

The future of meteorological simulation and forecasting may well be bound for the clouds — well, cloud datacenters anyway.  The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Wednesday announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft Azure to explore the use of cloud computing to advance climate research. This …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Can someone explain to a humble techie

Cloud is great if you're a startup and need to grow rapidly. I remember buying servers from Dell and hoping the client paid before the credit card bill arrived. Cloud is also great if computers aren't the core of your business and you need you need 10x as much capacity at certain times of year.

But if your expertise is running supercomputer models, and has been since supercomputers existed.

Your compute requirement is stable, well always increasing but known.

Your horizon for this project is - forever.

You are in a business where you can't just say no - lives depend on you running the app. You are owned by somebody that can literally print money to pay any bill demanded.

And you intend to hand all this over to a supplier who will let you transfer all your work to their system for free - and then later they get to decide how much to charge you ?

[robert lindsay]

Re: Can someone explain to a humble techie

NOAA is not a rich group, compare the NOAA supers to what DoE has, it not even close. Part of it wanting save on facilty and sysadmin staff. And also if the system get hacked its somebodyelses fault. Azure is mildly curios though, my part of NOAA is going AWS.

[P. Lee]

Re: Can someone explain to a humble techie

It is a terrible idea to not own your core business assets. How independent of Microsoft will the government be if they are dependent on Microsoft's goodwill on a minute-to-minute basis?