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Supercomputer status

 
 
History of supercomputing power at ncar

The computing capability at NCAR, as shown by recent increases in the center's peak capability (in teraflops), allows NCAR scientists to develop, test, and release updated versions of the WRF and CCSM models. CCSM version 3 was used to provide climate simulations to the IPCC AR4, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2007. With anticipated increases in computational capability at NCAR, activities are under way to build and test CCSM version 4 for participation in the 2010-2011 IPCC AR5.
 

During the first quarter of FY2007, CISL deployed the first phase of hardware of the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation (ICESS) contract with IBM. The new supercomputer blueice is based on the IBM POWER5+ dual-core processor and the High Performance Switch communication technology. It offers over twice the computing capacity as NCAR's IBM POWER5 system bluevista.

The deployment of blueice more than doubled the high-end computing resources available at NCAR. The IBM POWER4 system bluesky, which had been in operation since early FY2003, was decommissioned in March 2007. The deployment of blueice is consistent with CISL's strategic plan to significantly enhance the high-end computational environment at NCAR during FY2007, and it upgraded the production cyberinfrastructure available to the university, NCAR, and Climate Systems Laboratory (CSL) communities served by CISL.

During the first four months of blueice availability, CISL provided priority access to eight Breakthrough Science projects that required large numbers of processors and long periods of computational residency time to satisfy ambitious scientific goals. A large portion of blueice (1,200 processors) was reserved for four months to provide this opportunity to projects selected from the NSF GEO/ATM community and the overall NSF GEO community. Access to this amount of computing capability and capacity devoted to several grand challenge problems was unprecedented and allowed scientists to simulate and analyze problems never before addressed.

In June 2007, blueice was made available to the general user communities. Utilization of the resources provided by both bluevista and blueice then reached saturation quickly.

The second phase of ICESS hardware is scheduled to be delivered in April 2008. An IBM POWER6 supercomputer, to be named bluefire, will increase the computational capacity available to users by yet another significant factor. Due to electrical power constraints within the NCAR computing facility, both blueice and bluevista will be removed to provide the physical infrastructure headroom needed for the powerful IBM POWER6. This second phase of ICESS is designed to meet the continuing needs and requirements of the scientific community for computationally expensive endeavors, such as preparation for the IPCC AR-5 climate simulations with the Community Climate System Model Version 4 (CCSM4), which is currently under development.

This work aligns with the NCAR strategic priority of "Enhancing capability and capacity of NCAR supercomputing" and is supported by NSF Core funds, including CSL funding."