Message from SCD Director Al Kellie
I am pleased to highlight some of SCD's many activities during FY2000.
It has been a challenging and productive time for SCD staff. We have
overseen major machine upgrades resulting in a 400% increase in available
compute cycles for our community, provided for new mass storage
capabilities, enhanced our visualization resources, subcontracted with
UCAR to provide for enterprise web services, and provided easier access
to and management of treasured research datasets. SCD has moved
confidently out of the doldrums of the aborted NEC system acquisition
and has become a vibrant, energetic provider of the services required by
our constituents. Our mission is to support large and small research
investigators, no matter where they are located and to empower them
with access to user-centered computing facilities.
Greetings from the SCD staff
A major milestone in FY2000 was the upgrade of the computing capabilities
of the IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer (blackforest) to a 151-node,
604-processor cluster running the AIX operating system. Blackforest
now provides 135 compute nodes that are equally divided between
Community Computing users and the Climate Simulation Lab. Upgrades
were also applied to our test IBM SP system (babyblue) and to our
Compaq ES40 evaluation system (prospect). This, in conjunction with our
other production systems (four SGI Origin 2000 and two Cray J90se
machines) has kept SCD on track to providing teraflop computing for
the atmospheric and related sciences.
With increased computing capability comes the need to manage an
ever-greater volume of data. During this review period, we sought and
acquired three additional StorageTek automated tape cartridge systems for
our world-class Mass Storage System (MSS), bringing our total number of
automated tape handlers to five. At end FY2000, the MSS contains over 275
terabytes (TB) of research data, and the additional tape handlers will
allow us to continue providing outstanding data storage and delivery
services for the foreseeable future.
Recognizing that data are the currency of scientific research, SCD
expanded its data analysis capabilities with a new machine (dataproc)
dedicated to such work for our scientific researchers. Moreover, the
Data Support Section within SCD has worked hard to make more of its
research data archive (including major sets of corrected data) available
to researchers around the world. We have also teamed with UCAR's Unidata
program to provide a dedicated machine for use in distributing regional
weather data to university researchers around the country.
In another data-driven area, SCD has taken steps to create a leading-edge
scientific visualization facility to serve this ever-growing component of
data analysis and presentation. SCD's strong reputation in this developing
technology has been nationally recognized. We intend to invest
significantly in the development of this growing facility that may be
used for a variety of purposes, including real-time model analysis and
visualization, a collaboratory research environment, and access to the
evolving NSF GRID. Construction is slated to begin in November 2000.
Finally, in April 2000, members of the division began the complex
but important task of preparing a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the
next generation of computing hardware to be acquired for NCAR. In
preparing this RFP, the needs of both NCAR scientists and SCD
technical personnel were melded together to create a unique document
that will drive this important acquisition. Of particular note was
the need to create an entirely new suite of computing system performance
benchmarks, using various production codes (MM5, WRF, PCM, CCM, etc.)
as a metric for determining what type of system (or systems) should be
offered for NCAR's consideration. The RFP was released in draft form to
all interested vendors in late August 2000, and we plan to release the
final version at the end of October 2000.
As we report on our activities for this Annual Scientific Report, the staff
and management of SCD look forward to even greater challenges and exciting
opportunities in the coming months. As always, in all that we do, we seek
to provide the finest in computing resources, teamed with a dedicated and
talented staff to help advance our understanding of the Earth's complex
climate system.
Al Kellie
