SCD director Al Kellie
"NCAR, as a national discipline-specific
center, benefits enormously from the dedication and talented work of
SCD's staff, many of whom work silently behind the scenes, to ensure
that NCAR science advances in a seamless end-to-end, balanced, computing
environment." — Al Kellie
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by
Al Kellie
Fiscal Year 2003 was filled
with new challenges in high performance computing, data storage, data
analysis, and the provision of support facilities and services to NCAR's
large community of scientists. Yet, in the face of these challenges,
new opportunities have arisen as we work to maintain a world-class
supercomputing facility for our users.
SCD continues to offer a complete set of integrated support services
for researchers in the atmospheric, oceanic, and related sciences.
SCD's computing resources and facilities support researchers around
the world as well as at consortium member universities and at NCAR
and UCAR. Scientific progress along broad fronts is enabled by SCD's
support for the development and execution of large, long-running numerical
simulations and the archiving, manipulation, and analysis of extremely
large datasets.
Two major accomplishments stand out: the rapid integration of a large
new supercomputer into the NCAR computing facility and the release
of a portal that speeds users' ability to locate, access, and manage
research data.
Bluesky increases NCAR computational resources
As part of the expansion of NCAR's Advanced Research Computing System
(ARCS), a completely new supercomputer was added to the SCD computational
environment in early FY2003. Bluesky, an IBM Cluster 1600 system,
has a total of 1,216 POWER4 processors and a peak computational rate
of 6.32 teraflops.
Late in FY2003, bluesky was augmented by twelve 32-way p690 SMP frames,
adding an additional 384 POWER4 processors and raising the total peak
computational rate of the system to 8.23 teraflops. The augmentation
also increased bluesky's total disk capacity to 31 TB. Bluesky now
has 50 POWER4 p690 SMP frames, making it the single largest system
of this type in the world.
The addition of the bluesky system in FY2003 immediately doubled
both the Community and Climate Simulation Laboratory computing resources.
And as an indication of the system's power and capability, SCD has
allocated the 12 additional bluesky frames to increase the resource
capacity available to the NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM),
specifically for simulations to be submitted to the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) activity later in 2004.
It was a tribute to the cooperation throughout the division that
allowed such a fast, smooth commissioning: SCD's Operations and Infrastructure
Support Section provided infrastructure and logistics, the High-Performance
Systems Section worked on system configuration and problem resolution,
the Network Engineering and Telcommunications Section established network
connections, and the User Support Section prepared the system for production
users.
Community Data Portal released
Building on user requests, and working within the National Science
Foundation's Cyberinfrastructure Strategic Initiative, SCD released
a newly designed Community Data Portal (CDP) for our users.
This web-based site provides users with powerful search-and-browse
capabilities across many of the most valuable research datasets.
SCD's Visualization and Enabling Technologies Section also has published
metadata for hundreds of datasets from across our organization, further
enhancing the utility of the CDP for our users. This new facility has
had an immediate, positive impact on NCAR's scientific research community,
allowing them to locate valuable research data and to quickly incorporate
that data into their research projects.
User Forums gather valuable feedback
Seeking to discern the important issues that face our users as they
pursue their research, we convened a series of User Forums in
April 2003. Both NCAR (local) and university (remote) users were asked
to provide us with their perspectives on the viability and utility
of our services and resources, particularly from the standpoint of
how they accomplished their research. SCD wanted to gain insight into
the workflow processes of users as they planned for and used SCD's
services and resources.
Users reported on their computational requirements and experiences
using SCD's high-performance computing resources. The input from these
two forums will be crucial as SCD moves toward developing a
new strategic plan for the FY2005–2009 timeframe. Numerous
suggestions arising from the forum have already been implemented, resulting
in new introductory documentation, improvements to SCD's website, and
support for the NetCDF Operators (NCO) product.
Mass Storage System passes 1.5 terabytes
NCAR's Mass Storage System (MSS), recognized as one of NCAR's
"crown jewels," passed a significant milestone at the end
of FY2003. The NCAR MSS managed stored data exceeding 20.3 million
files of over 880 unique terabytes (TB), totaling over 1,502 TB
(1.5 petabytes) when including duplicate copies. This astounding
amount of data continues to be managed efficiently and securely, ensuring
scientists that they will be able to retrieve and store data crucial
to their research. At end-FY2003, the MSS was growing by approximately
27 TB per month, and at that rate, it will double in size in 18 months.
SCD continues to investigate new storage media technology in anticipation
of MSS growth as well as to provide users with mechanisms to more effectively
manage their data holdings.
Supporting geophysical climate research
These are but a few of the many activities that SCD's staff have
undertaken during FY2003. This year's Annual Scientific Report provides
an in-depth look at the level of support that SCD is committed to provide
to NCAR, UCAR, and the greater atmospheric sciences research community.
Behind these annual accomplishments, however, is a level of infrastructural
support that is literally without peer anywhere in the country. NCAR,
as a national discipline-specific center, benefits enormously from
the dedication and talented work of SCD's staff, many of whom work
silently behind the scenes, to ensure that NCAR science advances in
a seamless end-to-end, balanced, computing environment.
As we look forward to and plan for the future, we reflect here on
the accomplishments of this past fiscal year. As always, we seek to
provide the finest in computing, research, data storage, networking,
analysis, visualization resources, and user support, teamed with a
dedicated and talented staff, to help advance the understanding of
our complex geophysical climate system.
I invite you to read the overview in the Executive
summary of SCD's FY2003 accomplishments
and the details in SCD's FY2003 Annual
Scientific Report.
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