• NCAR Annual Report
• CISL report
• EOL report
• ESSL report
• RAL report
• SERE report

Production deployment of blueice supercomputer

		The 112-node IBM POWER5+ supercomputer blueice provides the scientific community with additional computation resources for both capacity and on-demand capability computing. The blueice cluster provides the platform for scientists to scale their codes into larger problem sizes and to increase the complexity of the physics within their simulations.

The blueice cluster represents the first phase of the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation (ICESS) procurement. It is a 112-node IBM POWER5+ Cluster 1600 with a peak speed of 12 teraflops. The system successfully completed its Acceptance Test Phase at 11:00 am on December 15, 2006. From that time through January, the system was dedicated to code qualification for the Breakthrough Science special computing campaign and some miscellaneous benchmark runs. It began full production on February 1, 2007.

The ICESS project in general and blueice in particular advance NCAR's strategic goal to "Provide robust, accessible, and innovative information services and tools" and NCAR's strategic priority of "Enhancing capability and capacity of NCAR supercomputing." Notably, blueice expands and extends the CISL-developed on-demand capability computing model that enables the entire cluster or portions of it to support dedicated or shared special computing campaigns, such as the Breakthrough Science campaign or this year's High Resolution Hurricane Simulation Special Computing Campaign.

Since entering production, the blueice cluster has serviced over 210,000 jobs, a 91% utilization rate, and a sustained rate of just over 600 gigaflops (four times that of the previous bluesky system). Of the approximately 210,000 jobs, just over 5% represent capability and/or special-campaign runs, with the other 95% representing capacity runs split in the ratio of 20/60/20 between the economy, regular, and premium classes of service.

In late FY2008, blueice will be phased out to make room for bluefire, the ICESS Phase 2 system. The bluefire cluster will be an IBM POWER6 Cluster 1600, and it will continue to provide capacity and on-demand capability to the scientific community for even larger and more complex simulations.

This project is made possible through NSF Core funds, including CSL funding.