NCAR Computing Center

High-end computing has been a vital facility at NCAR since it was founded. The NCAR computing center has handled the insatiable computational requirements of the atmospheric and related sciences community, coping with technology changes that span orders of magnitude of increased performance and data storage capacity. During that time, the role of computational science in the atmospheric and related sciences has increased massively. High-end computing facilities are integral to NCAR's mission.

The supercomputers are only one component of a functional computing facility. Networking, servers, and mass storage systems must also be provisioned. Further, the computing center itself must provide sufficient uninterruptible electrical power, efficiently remove the waste heat produced, and be large enough to house all the systems and support equipment. Above all, the entire facility must be reliable: outages are detrimental to scientific productivity and may even shorten the life span of the equipment.

The Mesa Laboratory computing center provides 13,000 square feet. In 2005, a significant three-step upgrade was completed on the electrical and mechanical systems. The culmination of a five-year process, this work included an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) upgrade, the installation of a standby generator, and a major upgrade of the cooling system. The facility's systems can now support the maximum design load of 1.2 Megawatts of computing.

To be effective, a computing center must keep four critical resources in balance: the raised-floor area that houses the computers, network connectivity for the computers, the cooling infrastructure to remove waste heat, and the electrical infrastructure to reliably deliver electricity to the computers and the cooling systems.

While computers have lifetimes of three to five years, facilities should continue to be useful for a minimum of 15 years and ideally 30. The computing facilities in the Mesa Lab have exceeded the 30-year mark and are a testament to the foresight of its designers.