June 7th, 2022: The Acquisition and Grants Office (AGO) Small Business Office recognizes Axiom Consultants, Inc as the NOAA Small Business of the Year for the fourth annual NOAA Small Business Program awards. 

The Small Business Program Awards recognize small businesses who demonstrate outstanding performance, accomplishment, and a spirit of partnership in support of NOAA’s mission. AGO recognizes the important role that small businesses play in the successful execution of the NOAA mission.

Axiom has been leading the charge in helping NWS answer the questions of whether the NWS could use Cloud computing for multi-processor tasks and how they compare to on premise HPC systems. Axiom’s engineers have not only been able to transition the complex systems to the cloud environment, but the Subject Matter Experts are exceeding all expectations at the leading edge and are well versed in new technologies that are being developed by the vendors (Google, AWS, Azure) and are working with the vendors to take advantage of them to provide the most efficient options to the government. Axiom has also been providing their experts to help train other scientists and engineers to make use of the cloud resources that are available. Through this project they have shown that not only can our modeling systems run on the cloud, but that they are comparable or even better than on prem systems in terms of performance. Axiom’s SMEs have also shown that our modeling systems can run on multiple different types of instances from different cloud vendors. In this project, Axiom has shown the viability of using the cloud by running sustained long forecast experiments through two month long test periods and shown that the cloud can match on prem HPC platforms for developing modeling systems.

NOAA’s on premise HPC platforms, while critical for developing the science at NOAA, are limited by their fixed compute capacity. The innovation led by Axiom for this project opens up the possibility for the government to use Cloud resources so that they can expand to use compute resources based on need. One example of this is NOAA finally being able to run 30-year retrospectives for reanalysis for the seasonal to sub-seasonal (S2S) forecast system. This will enable NOAA to fill the gap for data innovation of sub-seasonal forecasts, an emerging area for R&D for advancing and improving accuracy of medium to long range predictions.

Axiom is valued as an industry partner for NCEP/EMC as their SMEs and resources absorbed initial delays in procurement on Cloud services to get the RRFS modeling system migration to the Cloud project back on schedule. This project was delayed when access to AWS cloud compute allocations took longer than expected; therefore, delaying the necessary research and development required prior to the Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Experiment. Nevertheless, within a short time of getting access to cloud computing services, Axiom was able to set up the modeling system on time for two big summer experiments that were critical to demonstrate the viability of using the cloud as well as helping in assessing the skill of the modeling system. Thanks to Axiom’s Subject Matter Experts and their efforts, the RRFS project has already taken part in two major summer experiments and exceeded expectations for the major winter experiment that will test the capability of the system from end-to-end (data assimilation, forecast, products and verification).