NCAR to install new supercomputer in Wyoming

BOULDER — A second, more powerful supercomputer to help scientists better understand weather and climate change will be installed this year at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, the Boulder-based center announced Monday.

San Jose, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics International Corp. (Nasdaq: SGI) was selected by Boulder-based NCAR to build the new machine, named Cheyenne, in conjunction with centralized file system and data-storage components provided by Santa Clara, Calif.-based DataDirect Networks, reported to be the world’s largest privately held information-storage company.

The supercomputer, expected to become operational in early 2017, will help scientists lay the groundwork for improved predictions of a range of phenomena, from hour-by-hour risks associated with thunderstorm outbreaks to the timing of the 11-year solar cycle and its potential impacts on Global Positioning Satellite data and other sensitive technologies.

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The new computer will be a 5.34-petaflop system, meaning it can carry out 5.34 quadrillion calculations per second — more than 2.5 times the amount of scientific computing performed by Yellowstone, the current NCAR supercomputer that was built by IBM and came online in 2012. Even with its increased power, Cheyenne will be three times more energy efficient in terms of floating point operations per second, or flops, per watt than Yellowstone.

“The new system will have a peak computation rate of over 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of power consumed,” said NCAR’s Irfan Elahi, project manager of Cheyenne and section manager for high-end supercomputing services.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and the state of Wyoming through an appropriation to the University of Wyoming, the price tag of the new supercomputer is not being disclosed as the result of “a decision that was made internally,” said Jeff Smith, spokesman for NCAR and the University Center for Atmospheric Research.

Cheyenne and Yellowstone initially will work in tandem, Smith said, but the new supercomputer eventually will replace the old one.

NCAR sees Cheyenne as a critical tool for researchers across the country studying climate change, severe weather, geomagnetic storms, seismic activity, air quality, wildfires and other geoscience topics. Since the supercomputing facility in Wyoming opened its doors in 2012, more than 2,200 scientists from more than 300 universities and federal labs have used its resources.

“We’re excited to bring more supercomputing power to the scientific community,” said Anke Kamrath, director of operations and services at NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, in a prepared statement. “Whether it’s the threat of solar storms or a heightened risk in certain severe weather events, this new system will help lead to improved predictions and strengthen society’s resilience to potential disasters.”

The name of the new system was chosen to honor the support it has received from the people of that city. It also commemorates the upcoming 150th anniversary of Wyoming’s capital city, which was founded in 1867 and named for the Cheyenne tribe.

The new data-storage system for Cheyenne will be integrated with NCAR’s existing GLADE file system and provide an initial capacity of 20 petabytes, expandable to 40 petabytes with the addition of extra drives. This, combined with the current 16 petabytes of GLADE, will total 36 petabytes of high-speed storage. The new system also will transfer data at the rate of 200 gigabytes per second, which is more than twice as fast as the current file system’s rate of 90 gigabytes per second.

Cheyenne is expected to provide year-ahead predictions of streamflows and associated reservoir levels in greater detail, providing water managers, farmers and other decision-makers with information about likely water availability and the potential for drought or flood impacts. By conducting multiple simultaneous runs of high-resolution forecast models, it is expected to enable more specific predictions of severe weather, such as the probability that a cluster of intense thunderstorms with the risk of hail or flooding will strike a county at a particular hour.

Cheyenne’s abilities also are expected to help utilities predict how much energy will be generated by major solar arrays from hours to days in advance, and energy companies to better simulate the subsurface flows of water, oil and gas. It also should help scientists predict how specific regions will experience the effects of climate change, air pollutants and solar storms.

“Supercomputing is vital to NCAR’s scientific research and applications, giving us a virtual laboratory in which we run experiments that would otherwise be impractical or impossible to do,” said NCAR director James Hurrell. “Cheyenne will be a key component of the research infrastructure of the United States through its provision of supercomputing specifically tailored for the atmospheric, geospace and related sciences. The capabilities of this new system will be central to the continued improvement of our ability to understand and predict changes in weather, climate, air quality and space weather, as well as their impacts on people, ecosystems, and society.”

The 153,000-square-foot Wyoming supercomputing center is located in the North Range Business Park, near the interchange of Interstates 80 and 25, about 85 miles north of Boulder, Cheyenne was able to lure it away from Boulder in 2007 in a bidding war that came down to power — electrical, more than political.

UCAR’s Computational Information Systems Laboratory has operated supercomputers at NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory in Boulder since the 1960s, even though the building was not designed with supercomputing in mind. As new research questions required more-powerful computers to run increasingly complex simulations, NCAR looked for property near the Mesa Lab, but the city of Boulder couldn’t guarantee the price of power as Mesa was built out. Once built out, the facility was expected to need 25 megawatts, about one-fifth the power the city of Cheyenne needs every day to run, and the Mesa facility had capabilities for only 16 megawatts.

To secure the supercomputing center, the state of Wyoming invested $20 million, the Wyoming Business Council kicked in $4.5 million to create infrastructure for the site, and UW agreed to provide $1 million annually for 20 years to UCAR to help pay for the initial supercomputer. In exchange, UW received access to 20 percent of the computer’s computational system annually.

Ground was broken for the center in Cheyenne in June 2010.

In response — at least in part — to losing the supercomputer center to Wyoming, Colorado groups formed CO-LABS Inc., a consortium of federal laboratories, universities, private companies, economic-development groups, chambers of commerce and state organizations. CO-LABS is dedicated “to build and maintain a tight connection between the labs and their communities for the purpose of continuing and enhancing the ability of Colorado to compete for innovative and sustainable, scientific and technical economic development opportunities.”