Anupam-Alpha parallel computer for operational weather forecasting

Numerical weather prediction is a highly compute intensive application which, hitherto, was in the exclusive domain of prohibitively expensive vector supercomputers. "Going operational" on any platform implies regular, fail-safe production runs whose results are to be disseminated to customer agencies in a short time frame. We discuss an alternative approach based on standard, off-the-shelf components for medium range weather prediction using cluster based parallel processing. We also discuss the design and implementation issues of the low-cost solution and yet handle operational forecasting rigors effectively.