CISL 2007 annual report banner

Cyberinfrastructure procurement and deployment

 
 
blueice at NCAR

Blueice is a supercomputer based on the IBM POWER5+ processor and the High Performance Switch communication technology. When it was installed, it effectively doubled the high-end computing resources available at NCAR. CISL bears the ongoing responsibility to provide the numerical simulation community with resources that offer the optimal combination of computational capability and capacity that can be used effectively. This facility supports the NCAR strategic priority of "Enhancing capability and capacity of NCAR supercomputing."
 

Historically, NCAR has provided a computational environment to satisfy the center's strategic goal to "Provide robust, accessible, and innovative information services and tools" to universities and the broader scientific community. CISL fulfills this responsibility within the context of the NCAR Strategic Plan, and it continues to provide robust computational and scientific data services including:

  • High performance computing production environment
  • Mass storage
  • Network connectivity
  • Data analysis and visualization
  • Cultivation of the research data archive
  • Data distribution

 

Further, CISL continually evaluates opportunities to provide advanced services and tools designed to enable Earth system science for the entire community of users:

  • TeraGrid integration
  • Experimental computing systems
  • Earth System Knowledge Environment

 

The deployment during FY2007 of the IBM POWER5+ supercomputer blueice was the next step in CISL's five-year strategic plan goal to provide a 25-fold increase in sustained computing capacity (over 2004 levels) by 2009. The introduction of blueice represented the first-phase deployment of the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation (ICESS) contract with IBM, and more than doubled, over FY2006 levels, the compute capacity available to scientists. During FY2008 the second phase of the ICESS procurement, an IBM POWER6, will be installed and available to the user community. The computing capacity at NCAR will again increase by at least two-fold, and will keep CISL in alignment with its strategic goals.

NCAR's supercomputers are managed by CISL under the UCAR/NSF Cooperative Agreement and are supported by NSF Core funds including CSL funding.