| S CD announced
this week that NCAR has acquired a large-scale Linux-based computing
system to be installed the week of 12 July 2004. The 1.1 teraflop system,
manufactured by IBM, will add significant computing capacity and capability
to NCAR's computing arsenal.
The system will allow NCAR's major community modelers to build, test
and evaluate their codes in a full-scale Linux production computing
environment on systems that are similar to those available in the university
community.
SCD will manage and operate the system and, in partnership with key
NCAR climate and weather modelers, evaluate its suitability as an additional
computing resource to be made available to the larger modeling community.
"As climate scientists strive to learn more about the Earth
system, the complexity and computational requirements of the necessary
numerical models increase significantly," said Dr. William Collins
of NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics Division and chair of the Community
Climate System Model (CCSM) Scientific Steering Committee. "This
new Linux system will provide increased performance for the CCSM at
a lower price point than other supercomputers based on proprietary
technology. We are also excited about using it to provide better support
to university collaborators who might choose to deploy their own Linux
clusters for climate simulation."
The new system, named "lightning," is an IBM e1350 Linux
cluster comprised of:
- 128 dual-processor e325 batch nodes
- Two dual-processor e325 interactive nodes
- Two dual-processor x345 I/O nodes
- A single x345 maintenance node
The batch and interactive nodes each contain two 2.2 gigahertz AMD
Opteron processors, giving the system a peak computational capacity
of 1.1 teraflops. Each batch node has four gigabytes of memory and
each interactive node has nine gigabytes of memory, giving a total
system capacity of .53 terabytes of memory.
The batch nodes will be interconnected with a Myrinet-2000 switch,
which has a bidirectional bandwidth of 500 megabytes per second and
latency of four microseconds. The I/O nodes will manage seven terabytes
of local disk storage.
The system will initially be used for select models at NCAR, including
the CCSM and the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Since
many of these models are distributed to universities with Linux-based
systems on their campuses, the testing and development of such models
on a similar system at NCAR will greatly accelerate the transition
of these major models out into the community.
For more information, contact SCD associate director Tom Bettge (bettge@ucar.edu,
303-497-1371).
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