October 18, 2006

NCAR to showcase high-end technologies and scientific discovery at SC06

Series of presentations will focus on advances in computing capability at NCAR, new techniques in computational science and climate modeling

	The NCAR research exhibit at SC06 will provide a venue for technical presentations as well as a convenient meeting place for colleagues in the scientific community. NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) will host the exhibit.

Computational scientists and Earth system researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will offer a series of presentations at SC06 showing how NCAR uses high-end technologies to advance discovery in the geosciences.

SC06, the international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, takes place this year from November 11 to 17 at the Tampa Convention Center. NCAR, a founding member of the SC conference organization, has been active in the conference since 1988, the year it first convened.

NCAR’s SC06 exhibit (space #1815) will focus on topics such as the expansion of NCAR’s computational facility, access to NCAR computing and data resources via the TeraGrid, next-generation software tools for scientific research, and exciting new capabilities in climate modeling.

Experts from the NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) and Earth and Sun Systems Laboratory (ESSL) will give morning and afternoon presentations on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Speakers and presentations

		Tom Bettge, director of CISL Operations and Services, will discuss short- and long-term plans for enhancing computational and related facilities at NCAR, including the phased acquisition of the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation (ICESS), NCAR’s newest high-performance system.
		Rich Loft, director of CISL Technology Development, will discuss how NCAR’s participation in the TeraGrid will provide the U.S. geosciences community with increased access to NCAR computational resources, data archives, and tools for knowledge discovery.
		Don Middleton, manager of CISL’s Vizualization and Enabling Technologies Section, will examine the challenges of multidisciplinary international collaboration and describe a variety of scientific and technological tools being developed for NCAR’s Earth System Knowledge Environment.
		Mary Haley, a software engineer in CISL’s Vizualization and Enabling Technologies Section, will demonstrate the use of Python frameworks for geoscience visualization and analysis.
		Henry Tufo, manager of CISL’s Computational Science Section, will present the results of efforts to improve the scalability of the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) on the IBM BlueGene and CRAY XT3 systems.
		John Michalakes, a computational scientist in ESSL’s Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division, will describe capabilities of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model for operational weather forecasting, hurricane prediction, regional climate simulation, atmospheric chemistry, and air-quality prediction.
		Caspar Ammann, a paleoclimatologist in ESSL’s Climate and Global Dynamics Division, will talk about employing the latest generation of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM3) to study recent climate variability and potential future changes.

For more information

The schedule and abstracts for NCAR presentations at SC06 are available on the NCAR SC06 research exhibit home page:

http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/SC/06/

About CISL

NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory encompasses Operations and Services, Technology Development, and the Institute for Mathematical Applications in the Geosciences. CISL is a world leader in supercomputing and cyberinfrastructure, providing services such as high-end computing, data analysis, and data archival to more than 60 member universities of the University Consortium for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), as well as to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the larger Earth systems community. CISL also conducts basic and applied research in information technology, computational science, and mathematics to help scientists address grand challenge problems.

About NCAR

Established in 1960, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the only national supercomputing and mass storage facility dedicated exclusively to the atmospheric, oceanic, and related geosciences. Together with its partners at universities and research centers, NCAR focuses on exploring and understanding the atmosphere and its interactions with the Sun, the oceans, the biosphere, and human society.

—Lynda Lester