IBM
Linux cluster (lightning): 2004–present
 |
On July 12, 2004, SCD took delivery of "lightning," a large-scale, high-performance Linux cluster manufactured by IBM. The acquisition was part of SCD's new five-year Strategic Plan to evaluate new technologies and find ways for SCD to deliver more cost-effective tools for advancing the frontiers of science at NCAR.
The 1.1-teraflop system is considerably faster on a per-processor basis than bluesky, NCAR's IBM p690 system. In benchmark tests, the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) tests ran 30% faster, while the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) ran 40% faster. One reason for this is that lightning's Opteron processors, built by Advanced MicroDevices (AMD), have much better memory bandwidth than bluesky's Power4 processors.
 |
Related Links |
Many of NCAR's university partners who want to use models such as the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) or the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model have Linux-based systems. Lightning offers them, for the first time, the chance to build, test, and evaluate these codes in a full-scale Linux computing environment similar to their own.