[SatNews] Harris Corporation (NYSE:HRS) has completed the computer hardware delivery, installation and integration supporting the operational systems of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, R (GOES-R) Series Program ground segment at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facilities in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. GOES-R Series Program satellites will be a primary tool for detecting and tracking hurricanes and other severe weather, and the first satellite, GOES-R, will be launched in March 2016.
The GOES-R Series ground segment sends weather data products to the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System and the National Environmental Satellite Data, and Information Services (NESDIS) Product Distribution and Access (PDA) system. The data is distributed to NWS weather forecast offices and units of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, the Department of Defense, and environmental product consumers.
The system includes 2,100 servers, 149 racks of network equipment, 317 workstations, and storage services totaling three petabytes. The system also contains 454 blade servers with 3,632 cores for product processing and distribution across all environments, delivering approximately 40 trillion floating point operations per second of processing power.
“This represents a major milestone in the progress of the GOES-R Series Ground Segment program,” said Romy Olaisen, vice president, Global Weather Solutions Programs, Harris Government Communications Systems. “System testing can be completed now that the hardware is installed and integrated. Harris continues to meet its commitments on critical GOES-R Series Program milestones.”
As part of the ongoing pre-launch testing, Harris demonstrated the ability to create weather products in five minutes versus the current 30-minute GOES operational capability. Forecasters will have critical input faster in order to speed forecasts and warnings for extreme weather, once the new instruments are brought online following GOES-R launch.
Harris is the prime contractor and systems integrator for the GOES-R Series ground segment contract. The system will form an enterprise-wide backbone capable of ingesting, processing and distributing 40 times more data than current systems to the NWS and more than 10,000 other direct users.