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Supercomputer special campaigns

		This chart tracks the usage of NCAR computational resources by special computing campaigns (on-demand and Breakthrough Science) during FY2007. This shows the significant increase in support for special campaigns made possible by blueice, the first computer acquired through the ICESS procurement. Outcomes from work accomplished with the significantly larger computing resources available to special campaigns are changing researchers' expectations for the pace of scientific progress that can be made through numerical simulations. (See larger image.)

This year, CISL supported four major and several minor on-demand computing campaigns on the production supercomputer clusters, in addition to the eight Breakthrough Science projects that were hosted on the new IBM POWER5+ system blueice. These campaigns, and the provision of special queues and pre-emptive scheduling to support on-demand and real-time computing, are a regular feature of the services provided by CISL to the NCAR, university, and CSL scientific user communities. Some computational campaigns recur annually, such as the WRF hurricane real-time forecasts, while others are either a one-time event or are accommodated on an as-needed basis. A common CISL-developed Special Campaign Software Tool Suite is used to manage the computer systems and the scheduling of special campaign job runs.

While the NCAR production supercomputing environment provides capacity computing to the scientific end-user community, the special campaign mechanism supports ongoing computational projects and campaigns and on-demand capability computing for the scientific end-user community. CISL software engineers and system administrators have tuned and enhanced Platform Computing, Inc.'s LSF-HPC job scheduler to manage the supercomputer workload to accommodate these diverse needs, while continuing to maintain high system utilization and short wait times for jobs submitted for production computing.

CISL staff will continue to provide full 24x7 support for the special campaigns and on-demand, real-time computing during FY2008. Additionally, CISL software engineers and administrators will continue to enhance the CISL-developed Special Campaign Software Tool Suite and tune LSF-HPC to maximize system resource utilization, minimize job wait times, and to facilitate the use of NCAR computational resources.

The special computing campaigns and provision of on-demand and real-time computing support the NCAR strategic priority of "Developing and providing advanced services and tools." This work is made possible through NSF Core funds, including CSL funding.