Raytheon snares NOAA high-performance computing contract

Raytheon Co. has won a contract worth up to $368 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for high-performance computing resources to support advances in NOAA's environmental modeling capabilities.

The contract with Raytheon Information Systems of Upper Marlboro, Md., consists of a three-year base period, a four-year option period and a one-year option to provide for contract transition. NOAA expects initial delivery of the distributed high-performance computing system in October. The total ceiling value of the contract inclusive of all options is $368 million.

For the first time, NOAA is procuring services for all its applied research and development high-performance computing requirements across the agency to achieve economies of scale but will provide flexibility in the resulting services. NOAA is an agency of the Commerce Department.

NOAA will migrate the models developed on the system to operational weather and climate models to improve the nation's weather forecasts, including hurricane forecasts and severe weather forecasts, to improve seasonal drought forecasts and to reduce the uncertainties in long-range climate predictions.

Key components of NOAA's high-performance computing include:

• Large-scale computing, data post-processing, analysis and visualization capabilities
  
• A hierarchical storage management system to provide archiving capacity to meet the expected rates of data production on the high-performance computing system
  
• Software for resource management, system administration and application development
  
• Support services, including system administration, software engineering and system maintenance.