NCAR selects IBM for key components of new supercomputing center

NCAR & UCAR News Center: The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) today announced that IBM will install critical components of a petascale supercomputing system at the new NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC). The company was selected following a competitive open procurement process.

The IBM components consist of a massive central resource for file and data storage, a high performance computational cluster, and a resource for visualizing the data.

The new system, named Yellowstone, runs on an IBM iDataPlex and is expected to be delivered to the NWSC early next year. It will be the new facility’s inaugural system. Once installed, the system will go through a testing period before being made fully available for scientific research in the summer of 2012.

Yellowstone is expected to deliver 1.6 petaflops performance, or nearly 30 times the capacity of the system currently in use at NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, known as bluefire. Petaflops refers to a machine’s ability to perform one quadrillion calculations, called floating point operations (FLOPS), per second.

Scientists will use these advanced computing resources to understand complex processes in the atmosphere and throughout the Earth system, and to accelerate research into climate change, severe weather, geomagnetic storms, carbon sequestration, aviation safety, wildfires, and other critical geoscience topics...

The building housing the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was completed in the summer of 2011. (©UCAR. Photo by Carlye Calvin.