Spring 1999, Vol. 20, No. 1

SCD publishes FY1998 Annual Scientific Report

Or, "SCD's Greatest Hits" . . .

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by Brian Bevirt SCD's Annual Scientific Report (ASR) to the National Science Foundation is now published on the web. The report details SCD's accomplishments in fiscal year 1998, including major enhancements in computing capacity, storage systems, networking, and research data. Particularly significant were an overall doubling of computing capacity and the acquisition of a 128-microprocessor system for highly parallel models. SCD's highlights for FY1998 include upgrading the world's best atmospheric and oceanic datasets and enabling new scientific insights through visualization technology. The goal of the NCEP/NCAR Global Atmospheric Reanalysis Project was to normalize the previous 50 years of atmospheric data using a single state-of-the-art atmospheric model; this was completed on 23 July 1998. NCEP is the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, a critical part of the National Weather Service. The Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) was expanded and updated in FY1998. COADS maintains its status as the world's best surface ocean dataset; it now provides much of what the world knows about ocean surface temperature changes during the past 144 years. Ongoing enhancements to the hardware, software, and networking capabilities of SCD's Visualization Lab enhanced its role as a visual supercomputing environment that offers researchers new capabilities in analyzing and exploring complex datasets. The Annual Scientific Report also describes how SCD provides two sets of computing resources to university scientists, NCAR scientists, and special national/international projects relevant to atmospheric science. These two computing facilities are called Community Computing and the Climate Simulation Laboratory. The Community Computing resource serves the community of researchers in atmospheric, oceanic, and related sciences. At the end of FY1998, the Community computers supplied about 6 billion floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS) to researchers. The Climate Simulation Laboratory provides high-performance computing and storage systems to support large, long-running simulations that need to be completed in a short calendar period. The CSL is a national, special-use, computing facility for climate system modeling for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The CSL supplied about 14 GFLOPS to researchers in FY1998. If you would like to learn more about how SCD offers high-performance computing resources, mass data storage, high-speed network and data communications infrastructure, support services for users, research data, computational science support, computing operations, and services to the community, please visit SCD's latest Annual Scientific Report.

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