Hong Kong Airport Control Tower Scheduling and Weather Forecast Data Systems Solutions

North of Lantau Island in Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok is the Hong Kong International Airport. It has been formally operating since July 1998. The airport has been going through rapid growth and development and has become one of the major international aviation hubs. According to the recent polls Hong Kong International Airport is 5th largest airport in passenger traffic and is the first in the world in amount of cargo that passes through it. The airport now handles more than 140 domestic and international routes, of which 40 have to fly through Mainland China to get to their destination. Currently, Honk Kong Airport presents the most convenient transit waypoint en route to Mainland china and other Asian cities.
Hong Kong Airport’s global presence is exponentially gaining importance along with the recent global and domestic economic growth. As the business volume is increasing, the Hong Kong Airport is executing a rapid expansion of airline support personnel. This brings a need for a matching improvement in the existing airport facilities. Hong Kong International Airport is in a relatively inhospitable location near the mountains and surrounded by water, there are frequent severe climate changes such as typhoons, rainstorms, and fog. In such conditions accurate and timely weather forecasts are essential for normal aircraft operation. Aviation weather prediction model is very different from the traditional one, not only do forecasting Cluster Services have strict demands on the reliability and high accuracy rate of the system, it also requires computation of a very large scale of data in a limited time and a very complex computational process. All of these factors combined, the Hong Kong International Airport was facing a big challenge.

Application Analysis
Despite the complexity and the size of the airport’s control tower and meteorological data systems there is a considerable lack of security present. Let us analyze the airport’s meteorological data system:
First of all, it is necessary to collect regular reports on a wide range of meteorological data, it is also crucial to accurately analyze the data. The data that is received daily at Hong Kong International Airport includes weather reports collected from the Global Telecommunication Database and World Area Forecast System on extreme weather conditions, Hong Kong's rainfall stations and, satellite images, radar images, gas forecast map, wind altitude and temperature charts and other mathematical modeling and forecasting charts and reports;
Second, airlines need to select the most accurate and up-to-date weather information. Meteorological data processing is just a part of the total scope of aviation weather information. Airlines flight planning and in flight personnel can obtain the latest meteorological reports and other forecast information to ensure the safety of every departing and arriving aircraft;
Third, aside from weather and meteorological data other aviation services are also processed they include the Civil Aviation Department information, Airport Authority, and Security. It is obvious that the traditional server cluster cannot handle the complexity of the airport’s requirements. Only high-performance computers are up to the task put forth by the Hong Kong International Airport control tower.

Case Study:
Galactic Computing Ltd., high performance computing specialist, a supplier of integrated server, storage and HPC solutions, provided Hong Kong International Airport control tower with a redundant data processing system. The system consisted of blade servers with multi-core Intel processors linked to InfiniBand storage systems supporting service failover between two remote locations. The system was used by the meteorological data processing team in the Airport control tower to analyze incoming data from the airport radar and other aviation systems, as well as for other issues that the control tower staff faced.
While constructing a tailored system for the airport’s control tower, Galactic’s team kept in mind that the system has to be highly precise, error free and deliver the results on time. Even the smallest error could have resulted in serious consequences for the operational status of the airport. Lack of precision or delays in the processing could lead to planes not being on time and larger errors might have led to the paralysis of the entire control tower. Galactic’s competency in program design allowed the team to create a system that minimized these errors.

As designed by Galactic, the deployment featured the latest fifth-generation HPC blade SuperBlade V5.0, enterprise-class redundant multi-core servers and the InfiniBand (IB) storage systems linked by the 20Gbps Infiniband network fabric. Fat tree network topology allowed the latest Intel Xeon multi-core processors to communicate over point-to-point high-efficiency high-bandwidth connections with each computing node without delays. Galactic HPC high-performance software suite complemented the hardware capabilities with features such as implementation of the GFS cluster file system, data mirroring, remote backup and system-wide failover. This ensured the stability of the cluster system and enabled it to serve as a safe and reliable storage and processing center for the meteorological data. The design is compatible with the first phase of the Hong Kong Observatory weather forecasting system comprising dedicated Galactic blades and storage systems. Two concurrently running systems let the service attain a measure of protection against even the most severe disasters, which results in 24/7 annual availability in all-weather conditions to ensure that meteorological data is processed on time.

Not only that, Galactic’s highly scalable systems based on multi-core blade servers can be expanded at any time over the entire technological life cycle, so that Hong Kong International Airport’s control tower systems have more resources at their disposal. To further increase the viability of the solution, the blade design supports incremental system upgrades permitting the control tower team to keep the system compatible with the other equipment to avoid the waste of resources.
The successful installation of Galactic’s system to Hong Kong Airport has allowed the airport to function with greater stability, reliability and precision. Now the Hong Kong International Airport’s control tower meteorological data processing system is in stable operational mode, providing the latest weather information timely and accurately.

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