The Weather Company, an IBM Business, Helps People Make Informed Expands Decisions and Take Action in the Face of Weather

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

The Weather Company, an IBM Business, Helps People Make Informed Expands Decisions and Take Action in the Face of Weather Business challenge The Weather Company’s websites serve millions of users per day. When extreme weather hits and usage peaks, the sites must be at their fastest and most reliable to provide the information people need to stay safe. Transformation To optimize for elasticity in handling extreme spikes in demand, The Weather Company worked with IBM to migrate Chris Hill, VP and its web platform quickly and seamlessly Chief Information and from its existing cloud provider to the Technology Officer for IBM Watson Media and IBM® Cloud™. Weather Business benefits: “IBM Cloud is the perfect The Weather Company, engine to power the world’s largest weather Unlocks an IBM Business websites and deliver the significant cost savings on fastest, most accurate cloud hosting and support Migrating the world’s top weather insight to millions of users around the globe.” weather web property to Chris Hill VP, CIO and CTO Accelerates IBM Watson Media and Weather deployment of new services a secure, scalable global with Kubernetes architecture in the IBM Cloud The Weather Company, an IBM Business, helps people make informed Expands decisions and take action in the face of weather. The company offers the most global reach with access accurate forecasts globally with personalized and actionable weather data to a larger number of data and insights to millions of consumers, as well as thousands of marketers and Share this centers in local markets businesses via Weather’s API, its business solutions division, and its own digital products from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com). Instant insight when During major weather events, The Five years ago, The Weather Company The Weather Company made the critical Weather Company relies on its started moving its infrastructure into the decision to architect its new environment it matters most infrastructure to deliver very high cloud, architecting most of its systems on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, which performance when its servers are under around the services offered by its cloud orchestrates container management Many companies build their web the most intense load. Extreme weather provider. The cloud platform helped across an extensive cluster of platforms on the assumption that the systems are often fast-moving and to address the company’s scalability IBM Cloud Virtual Servers. Kubernetes, traffic they need to serve will be driven by difficult to predict, so to handle massive, challenges, but also locked it into using the open-source container management predictable factors. For example, a retailer short-notice peak workloads, the proprietary technologies. platform that has recently become a expects extended seasonal peaks around company depends on the ability to scale de facto standard, provides a powerful, the winter holidays, with sharp spikes up rapidly at any time. Jagmeet Chawla, Global Head declarative way to define how containers for major events such as Black Friday. of Architecture Office and Cloud should be started, shut down and Scaling to handle increased demand can Wendy Frazier, Head of Consumer Web Engineering at The Weather Company, monitored, and what hardware resources be challenging, but long-term planning Development and Content Delivery at says: “Today there are much better they can utilize. IBM provides Kubernetes makes it a solvable problem. The Weather Company, explains: “During options for building cloud solutions on as a managed service, significantly Hurricane Sandy, our sites served close open-source software. To put ourselves in reducing the burden on The Weather Weather websites like weather.com to 9 petabytes of video data in one day. a stronger position to meet future growth Company’s DevOps resources. and wunderground.com, however, It’s really important that the system can and scalability challenges, we decided to face an exponentially harder scalability scale because our volumes can go from re-architect all our cloud services using “In a traditional microservices world, challenge—and their ability to perform one extreme to the other, overnight.” open-source tools in the IBM Cloud. we’d need a lot more DevOps pipeline to at a high level during periods of intense Our web platform was the perfect place handle all this management work,” says demand can literally spell the difference Since weather is a hyper-local to start.” Chris Hill. “Once we start setting up new between life and death. phenomenon, the scalability of the web services with IBM Cloud Kubernetes platform needs to be localized, too. As Service, we expect to see a significant Chris Hill, VP and Chief Information and The Weather Company expands its Designing an time-saving for our DevOps team.” Technology Officer for IBM Watson Media operations into markets such as Japan, and Weather, explains: “Our sites are India and Eastern Europe, it needs to open-source cloud For example, developers can now unique because when they’re operating at be able to harness local data centers platform experiment easily in the languages of scale is when they add the greatest value. to bring its endpoints closer to the their choice, pushing changes to dev The most critical time to provide accurate, user to minimize latency. Localizing its Many of The Weather Company’s web and test systems that are scaled out on timely information is during hurricanes, data centers adds further complexity servers were running in portable Docker separate clusters. Those pushes are tornadoes and severe winter storms, to the scalability challenge, because containers on the company’s existing automated with open toolchains and because that’s when weather insight really each local instance must be able to cloud platform, making them relatively IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery, which helps people keep themselves and their scale independently: a tornado in the straightforward to migrate to a different automates and accelerates build and families safe.” US Midwest creates demand peaks cloud provider. The team viewed the deployment processes. in that region, with little effect on project as both an important first step operations elsewhere. on its journey to the IBM Cloud, and a strong test of the capabilities of the new platform. 2 Jagmeet Chawla agrees: “The way “With many cloud providers, if you want With the IBM Cloud infrastructure With its global reach, IBM can also offer IBM has engineered Cloud Kubernetes security, you have to explicitly configure in place, The Weather Company is The Weather Company an extensive Service, it frees our team to focus on it yourself—their approach is to leave focusing on completing the migration range of 28 data center options in the business requirements, rather than things open until you specify otherwise,” of its web properties before moving 19 countries. In the future, this can help worrying about the operational details of says Jagmeet Chawla. “With IBM, it’s the on to re-architect other aspects of its the company extend its local footprint how to run the cluster.” opposite: you start with full security and infrastructure. The fact that The Weather in emerging markets and continue its relax it only as much as you need to. It’s Company’s systems can coexist easily strategy of minimizing latency by keeping To store static assets—such easier to build systems that are secure across multiple clouds and on-premises web endpoints as close to the user as images and videos—that by default.” infrastructure demonstrates IBM Cloud’s as possible. weather.com and wunderground.com ability to handle the intensive demands of serve to users, The Weather Company “IBM is synonymous with security—that’s enterprise workloads. IBM Cloud also gives The Weather uses IBM Cloud Object Storage. why its clients have so much trust in the Company access to infrastructure- The new storage solution provides IBM brand,” adds Chris Hill. “We are Under the covers, the company manages as-a-service offerings such as highly compatible APIs that make it already speaking with government and an extensive set of core weather systems IBM Cloud bare metal servers. In the easy to interoperate with other cloud financial services clients about future and APIs, which ingest and process future, this could help the team migrate storage platforms—reducing the projects, and the security that the IBM petabytes of data from weather radar services that can’t be containerized need for The Weather Company to Cloud offers is a major selling-point.” and other sources. Additionally, the easily, and support high-performance make significant code changes to its company is planning to expand its use workloads that require specific hardware front-end web applications. From a support perspective, IBM Cloud of IBM Watson® services, such as profiles or custom configuration. provides sophisticated dashboards and IBM Watson™ Captioning for adding “We really like the cross-region replication monitoring tools to help The Weather closed captions to its vast video library, “As far as possible, we want to focus on that IBM Cloud Object Storage System Company team manage its extensive and IBM Watson Assistant to build harnessing the open source platform provides,” says Jagmeet Chawla. “It’s web server estate. The team is using IBM AI-powered chatbots to help online that IBM Cloud provides,” says Chris Hill. easy to configure, and it adds an extra Cloud Logging and Monitoring, together users. The company is also considering “Nevertheless, it’s a major advantage level of resilience. Even if a whole data with familiar third party tools such as harnessing IBM Watson Studio to that IBM Cloud bare metal servers are center went offline, we could still serve Sysdig and Prometheus, which are easy augment its machine learning and deep available if we need them. It opens up content to our users.” to integrate with the IBM Cloud stack. learning capabilities and embed AI into options that we just didn’t have with our its applications.
Recommended publications
  • 30 Years of Moving Individual Atoms
    FEATURES 30 YEARS OF MOVING INDIVIDUAL ATOMS 1 2 l Christopher Lutz and Leo Gross – DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2020205 l 1 IBM Research – Almaden, San Jose, California, USA l 2 IBM Research – Zurich,¨ 8803 Ruschlikon,¨ Switzerland In the thirty years since atoms were first positioned individually, the atom-moving capability of scanning probe microscopes has grown to employ a wide variety of atoms and small molecules, yielding custom nanostructures that show unique electronic, magnetic and chemical properties. his year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication by IBM researchers Don Eigler and Erhard Schweizer showing that individ- Tual atoms can be positioned precisely into chosen patterns [1]. Tapping the keyboard of a personal computer for 22 continuous hours, they controlled the movement of a sharp tungsten needle to pull 35 individ- ual xenon atoms into place on a surface to spell the letters “IBM” (Figure 1). Eigler and Schweitzer’s demonstration set in motion the use of a newly invented tool, called the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), as the workhorse for nanoscience research. But this achievement did even more than that: it changed the way we think of atoms. m FIG. 2: The STM that Don Eigler and coworkers used to position atoms. The It led us to view them as building blocks that can be tip is seen touching its reflection in the sample’s surface. (Credit: IBM) arranged the way we choose, no longer being limited by the feeling that atoms are inaccessibly small. with just one electron or atom or (small) molecule. FIG.
    [Show full text]
  • The Weather Company History on Demand
    Solution Brief The Weather Company History on Demand Learn from the past’s data to prepare for the future’s business demands Highlights Anecdotes are great for telling stories, but they lose credibility when your near real-time business decisions depend on – Precision them for actionable data. History on Demand (HoD), from The – Accuracy Weather Company, an IBM Business, provides the historical – Speed of scale context we believe you need to extrapolate relationships and – Competetive pricing make correlations with your past business and operational – 35km grid results to help you predict future business needs and – 5+ years historical data outcomes. HoD offers competitively priced and accurate historical weather information, featuring a 35 km worldwide grid and hourly historical information dating back to July 2011. Make global decisions locally HoD provides a worldwide, consistent dataset of the most important and commonly used weather parameters accessible via web API. You can obtain large historical datasets specific to your geography and time without having to rummage through unorganized public datasets. Couple the historical data with your analysis and our forecast products, and you’ll have the tools to help you manage and minimize significant weather impacts on your business and better plan for them in the future. Convenient access in one package HoD offers a comprehensive dataset spanning July 2011 to the present, and new data is regularly added as it becomes available. HoD contains hourly values for surface temperature, wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, dewpoint and precipitation rate. Access can be gained by latitude/longitude and is supported for a list of latitudinal/longitudinal points, as well as a bounding box specification.
    [Show full text]
  • The Evolution of Ibm Research Looking Back at 50 Years of Scientific Achievements and Innovations
    FEATURES THE EVOLUTION OF IBM RESEARCH LOOKING BACK AT 50 YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS AND INNOVATIONS l Chris Sciacca and Christophe Rossel – IBM Research – Zurich, Switzerland – DOI: 10.1051/epn/2014201 By the mid-1950s IBM had established laboratories in New York City and in San Jose, California, with San Jose being the first one apart from headquarters. This provided considerable freedom to the scientists and with its success IBM executives gained the confidence they needed to look beyond the United States for a third lab. The choice wasn’t easy, but Switzerland was eventually selected based on the same blend of talent, skills and academia that IBM uses today — most recently for its decision to open new labs in Ireland, Brazil and Australia. 16 EPN 45/2 Article available at http://www.europhysicsnews.org or http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epn/2014201 THE evolution OF IBM RESEARCH FEATURES he Computing-Tabulating-Recording Com- sorting and disseminating information was going to pany (C-T-R), the precursor to IBM, was be a big business, requiring investment in research founded on 16 June 1911. It was initially a and development. Tmerger of three manufacturing businesses, He began hiring the country’s top engineers, led which were eventually molded into the $100 billion in- by one of world’s most prolific inventors at the time: novator in technology, science, management and culture James Wares Bryce. Bryce was given the task to in- known as IBM. vent and build the best tabulating, sorting and key- With the success of C-T-R after World War I came punch machines.
    [Show full text]
  • Spark and DB2 -- a Perfect Couple
    Spark and DB2 -- A perfect couple Pallavi Priyadarshini [email protected] Senior Technical Staff Member Spark Technology Center, IBM Session # E11 | Wed, May 25 (1 PM – 2 PM) | Platform: Cross platform Agenda Objective 1: Spark fundamentals relevant to database integration Objective 2: Integration between Spark and IBM data servers through DataFrame API Objective 3: Loading DB2 data into Spark and writing Spark data into DB2 Objective 4: Spark Use Cases Demo Power of data. Simplicity of design. Speed of innovation. Background What is Spark An Apache Foundation open source project. Not a product. An in-memory compute engine that works with data. Not a data store. Enables highly iterative analysis on large volumes of data at scale Unified environment for data scientists, developers and data engineers Radically simplifies process of developing intelligent apps fueled by data. History of Spark . 2002 – MapReduce @ Google . 2004 – MapReduce paper . 2006 – Hadoop @ Yahoo . 2008 – Hadoop Summit . 2010 – Spark paper . 2014 – Apache Spark top-level . 2014 – 1.2.0 release in December Activity for 6 months in 2014 . 2015 – 1.3.0 release in March (from Matei Zaharia – 2014 Spark Summit . 2015 – 1.5 released in Sep ) . 2016 – 1.6 released in Jan . Spark is HOT!!! . Most active project in Hadoop ecosystem . One of top 3 most active Apache projects . Databricks founded by the creators of Spark from UC Berkeley’s AMPLab Why Spark? Spark is open, accelerating community innovation Spark is fast —100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce Spark is about all data for large-scale data processing Spark supports agile data science to iterate rapidly Spark can be integrated with IBM solutions Our partner ecosystem IBM announces major commitment™ - to advance Apache® Spark The Analytics Operating System …the most significant open source project of the next decade.
    [Show full text]
  • Ogeorgia's Economy
    GEORGIA’S CREA TIVE OECONOMY Creative Industries GEORGIA’S 1 Establishments: 11,426 Jobs: 116,5771 Wages: $8.4 billion1 Self-Employed: 58,9592 Earnings: $1.6 billion2 CREA Revenue: $29 billion3 Economic Impact: $48 billion4 Sources: 1EMSI 2013 2Nonemployer Statistics 2012, TIVE 3Creative Industries in the South 2012 4ACPSA Issue Brief #5: ECONOMY The Impact of New Demand for Arts and Culture Film and Television Combined Productions: 158 Direct Spend of Productions: $1.4 billion Direct Jobs: 23,500 Direct and Indirect Jobs: 77,900 Direct and Indirect Wages: $3.8 billion Economic Impact: $5.1 billion Source: Georgia Entertainment Industry Profile FY14 2 Music Direct and Indirect Jobs: 26,2211 Direct and Indirect Wages: $1.1 billion1 Total Revenues to State and Local Governments: $314 million2 1 Economic Impact: $3.6 billion Source: 1Estimated Economic Impact of the Music Industry on Georgia’s Metropolitan Areas and the State, 2014 2Source: Economic and Fiscal Impact Analysis of the Music Industry in Georgia, 2011 Digital Entertainment Direct Jobs: 1,824 Direct and Indirect Jobs: 8,719 Wages: $528 million Revenue: $758 million State Tax Revenue: $49 million Exports: $47 million Economic Impact: $1.9 billion Source: Georgia’s Digital Entertainment Industry, 2012 3 Arts & Culture Organizations: 2,3911 Jobs: 24,2282 Wages: $478 million2 Revenue: $1.1 billion3 Assets: $2.5 billion4 Economic Impact: $1.8 billion5 Source: 1National Center for Charitable Statistics, 2013 2Economic Census, 2007 and Nonemployer Statistics, 2012 3National Center for Charitable Statistics, 2013 and Nonemployer Statistics, 2012 4National Center for Charitable Statistics, 2013 5ACPSA Issue Brief #5: The Impact of New Demand for Arts and Culture 4 GEORGIA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS A division of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Council for the Arts (GCA) empowers the arts industry in Georgia and artists around the state to cultivate healthy, vibrant communities that are rich in civic participation, cultural experiences, and economic prosperity.
    [Show full text]
  • IBM Kenexa Assessments Solutions Brief and Catalog
    IBM Kenexa Solutions Brief and Catalog IBM Kenexa Assessments Solutions Brief and Catalog Choosing the right person for the right job, and assessing traits, skills and fit for individuals, managers, and leaders is crucial to your success. IBM Kenexa Assessments Catalog IBM Kenexa offers an expansive portfolio of assessments • A multiple-choice format and newer formats of that assess personality traits, problem solving, learned skills, simulation and computer-adaptive testing for job and job/organizational fit. Our assessments are designed for evaluation. all levels of an organization, including individual • Capacity and capability assessments including natural contributors, managers, and leaders. IBM Kenexa Assess on talent in a specific area, work style preferences, acquired Cloud is one of the industry’s largest and most powerful experience, and a combination of cognition and global and mobile capable content solutions available in the knowledge; organizational fit assessments that measure marketplace today. IBM Kenexa Assessments provide you fit in terms of company culture, values, and preferences with industry-leading content and support to find quality for job characteristics; and onboarding assessments to candidates and maximize their performance. help accelerate time-to-productivity of new hires and understand their learning styles. At IBM Kenexa, we know that people differentiate great • Each result includes a detailed candidate profile that companies. We believe empowering companies to hire the reveals strengths and developmental needs as compared right people yields the best business results. IBM Kenexa to the job evaluation; follow-up interview questions employs Ph.D. or licensed Industrial/Organizational (I/O) tailored to the role and the candidate’s specific results; psychologists worldwide.
    [Show full text]
  • IBM Storage Suite for IBM Cloud Paks Data Sheet
    IBM Storage Suite for IBM Cloud Paks Data Sheet IBM Storage Suite for IBM Cloud Paks IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks offers Highlights a faster, more reliable way to modernize and move to the cloud • Flexible sofware-defined data resources for easy Today, 85% of enterprises around the world are already container deployments operating in a hybrid cloud environment.1 At the same time, • Reduce risk and complexity more than three-quarters of all business-critical workloads when moving mission- have yet to make the transition to the cloud.2 These metrics critical apps to the cloud suggest that for all the benefits conveyed by cloud • Market-leading Red Hat and computing, many organizations still face plenty of challenges award-winning IBM ahead to fully incorporate cloud-native solutions into their Spectrum Storage software core business environments. Containerization is a key enabling technology for flexibly delivering workloads to private and public clouds and DevOps. Among their many benefits, containers allow legacy applications to run in almost any host environment without being rewritten – an enormous advantage for enterprises with numerous applications, each composed of thousands of lines of code. To facilitate deployment of containerized workloads and development of new cloud-native applications, companies large and small are modernizing around platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift. IBM has developed a series of middleware tools called IBM Cloud Pak solutions designed to enhance and extend the functionality and capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift. The solutions include Cloud Pak for Data, Business Automation, Watson AIOps, Integration, Network Application, and Security, and give enterprises the fully modular and easy-to- consume capabilities they need to bring the next 80% of their workloads into modern, cloud-based environments.
    [Show full text]
  • STM Single Atom/Molecule Manipulation and Its Application to Nanoscience and Technology
    Critical Review article, J. Vac. Sci. Tech. in press (2005). STM Single Atom/Molecule Manipulation and Its Application to Nanoscience and Technology Saw-Wai Hla Department of Physics and Astronomy, Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute, Ohio University, Athens, OH-45701, USA; email: [email protected] Key Words: STM, atom, molecule, manipulation, nanoscience, nanotechnology. Abstract: Single atom/molecule manipulation with a scanning-tunneling-microscope (STM) tip is an innovative experimental technique of nanoscience. Using STM-tip as an engineering or analytical tool, artificial atomic-scale structures can be fabricated, novel quantum phenomena can be probed, and properties of single atoms and molecules can be studied at an atomic level. The STM manipulations can be performed by precisely controlling tip-sample interactions, by using tunneling electrons, or electric field between the tip and sample. In this article, various STM manipulation techniques and some of their applications based on the author’s experience are described, and the impact of this research area on nanoscience and technology is discussed. * Correspondence to; Saw-Wai Hla, Physics and Astronomy Dept., Ohio University, Clippinger 252 C, Athens, OH-45701, USA. Tel: 740 593 1727, Fax: 740 593 0433. 1 I. INTRODUCTION for a long period of time. Electrochemically etched polycrystalline tungsten wires are used as the tips in most In the mid 20th century, the possibility to image or to see an experiments described here. The tip-apex is usually atom was a matter of great debate. Only after the Nobel- prepared by using in-situ tip formation procedure36 award winning invention of Scanning Tunneling described in the next section.
    [Show full text]
  • IBM Services ISMS / PIMS Products / Pids in Scope
    1H 2021 Certified Product List IBM services ISMS/PIMS Product/Service Offerings/PIDs in scope The following is a list of products associated with the offering bundles in scope of the IBM services information security management system (ISMS). The Cloud services ISMS has been certified on: ISO/IEC 27001:2013 ISO/IEC 27017:2015 ISO/IEC 27018:2019 ISO/IEC 27701:2019 As well as the IBM Cloud Services STAR Self-Assessment found here: This listing is current as of 07/20/2021 IBM Cloud Services STAR Self-Assessment Cloud Controls Matrix v3.0.1 https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/registry/ibm-cloud/ To find out more about IBM Cloud compliance go to: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/compliance/global type groupNameproductName pids ISO Group AccessHub-at-IBM Offering AccessHub-at-IBM N/A ISO Group AI Applications - Maximo and TRIRIGA Offering IBM Enterprise Asset Management Anywhere on Cloud (Maximo) 5725-Z55 Offering IBM Enterprise Asset Management Anywhere on Cloud (Maximo) Add-On 5725-Z55 Offering IBM Enterprise Asset Management on Cloud (Maximo) Asset Configuration Manager Add-On 5725-P73 Offering IBM Enterprise Asset Management on Cloud (Maximo) Aviation Add-On 5725-P73 Offering IBM Enterprise Asset Management on Cloud (Maximo) Calibration Add-On 5725-P73 Offering IBM Enterprise Asset Management on Cloud (Maximo) for Managed Service Provider Add-On 5725-P73 Offering IBM Enterprise Asset Management on Cloud (Maximo) Health, Safety and Environment Manager Add-On 5725-P73 Offering IBM Enterprise Asset Management on Cloud (Maximo) Life Sciences Add-On
    [Show full text]
  • Weather Company Alerts Console
    2 August 2 021 May 2019 Alerts Console Weather Company USER GUIDE ALERTS CONSOLE 2 COPYRIGHT © 2021 The Weather Company, an IBM Business © 2016 IBM Corporation All Rights Reserved; Confidential Material T he Weather Company 4 00 Minuteman Road Andover, MA 01810 DOCUMENT INFORMATION Weather Alerts User Guide Last updated August 10, 2 021 © 2021 The Weather Company, an IBM Business © 2016 IBM Corporation ALERTS CONSOLE 3 CONTENTS ABOUT THIS GUIDE ............................................................................................................................................... 4 Related resources .................................................................................................................................... 4 Getting help .............................................................................................................................................. 4 OVERVIEW OF WEATHER ALERTS ...................................................................................................................... 5 Scenario: Improving customer loyalty through alerts ............................................................................... 5 Technical requirements and compatibility ................................................................................................ 5 Planning your alert service ....................................................................................................................... 6 Setting up Weather Alerts .......................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Corporate Responsibility Report 2 2016 IBM Corporate Responsibility Report
    2016 Corporate Responsibility Report 2 2016 IBM Corporate Responsibility Report 3 Chairman’s letter 4 Year in review 8 Our approach to corporate responsibility 12 Awards and recognition 14 Performance summary 18 Communities 34 The IBMer 42 Environment 84 Supply chain 98 Governance About this report IBM’s annual Corporate Responsibility Report is published during the Unless otherwise noted, the data in this report covers our global second quarter of the subsequent calendar year. This report covers operations. Information about our business and financial performance is our performance in 2016 and some notable activities during the first half provided in our 2016 Annual Report. IBM did not employ an external of 2017. agency or organization to audit the 2016 Corporate Responsibility Report. In selecting the content for inclusion in our 2016 report, we have used the As we continue our journey to transform IBM into a cognitive solutions and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting principles of materiality, cloud platform company, we regularly review our strategy and approach sustainability context, stakeholder inclusiveness, and completeness. A to corporate responsibility. This ongoing analysis helps us to identify and GRI report utilizing the GRI G4 Sustainability Guidelines, as well as prioritize the issues of relevance to our business and our stakeholders. In additional details about IBM’s corporate responsibility activities and 2014 we engaged Business for Social Responsibility, a global nonprofit performance, can be found at our corporate responsibility website. business network and consultancy dedicated to sustainability, to conduct a materiality analysis. That analysis maps corporate responsibility priorities to IBM’s business strategy, stakeholders, and impact on global society.
    [Show full text]
  • Identifying Your Contributions in an Evolving
    The Global high-Resolution Atmospheric Forecast (GRAF) System: Advancing NWP through Strategic Partnerships Kevin R. Petty, Ph.D. Director of Science and Forecast Operations The Weather Company/IBM WMO OCP May 2021 Courtesy NCAR The Weather Company, an IBM Business / May 26, 2021 / © 2021 IBM Corporation GOALS AND CONSIDERATIONS Remain at the forefront of weather forecasting science and technology Advance the TWC/IBM forecast stack, with a focus on global, convective-allowing, rapidly-updating NWP Generate measurable, operational results on a relatively short time horizon (i.e., < 2years) Ensure initial investments result in sustainable, long- term capabilities that can be continually improved Leverage trusted, capable partners that have well- aligned objectives The Weather Company, an IBM Business / May 26, 2021 / © 2021 IBM Corporation KEY PARTNERS IN THE OPERATIONAL IMPLEMENTATION OF GRAF IBM Research IBM Systems NCAR Facilitate top performance on IBM Design and deliver the Power9 GPU- Lead the development of the GPU- systems, with a particular focus on based HPC upon which the GRAF accelerated MPAS system and work code optimization system operates with TWC to ensure optimal forecast output from IBM GRAF NVIDIA TWC/IBM Univ. of Washington Deliver knowledge and resources Testing, implementation and Support the porting of MPAS code aimed at supporting code operation of the MPAS core, as well and work in parallel on exploring optimization on GPU technology as advancements related to TWC- new, novel data sources that have specific goals and requirements the potential to contribute to improved weather forecasts The Weather Company, an IBM Business / May 26, 2021 / © 2021 IBM Corporation GLOBAL WEATHER ENTERPRISE Delivering public programs, goods, or Supplying products, services, and services (national, state, local) solutions targeting B2B and B2C markets Public Private Society Academic CBOs Provide core education and research NGOs Community-Based Organizations: elements Dedicated to working at a local level to improve life for residents.
    [Show full text]