IBM working on NCAR’s supercomputer

BOULDER – IBM is helping build the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s new supercomputer at the new NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Wyoming.

IMB will install components of the peta-scale supercomputing system, after winning 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.

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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, per second.

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

“Yellowstone will provide needed computing resources to greatly improve our understanding of Earth and produce significant benefits to society,´ said Anke Kamrath, director of operations and services for NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. “We are very pleased to have such a high-performance system inaugurate the new supercomputing center.”

The computer center is the result of a partnership between NCAR; the University of Wyoming; the state of Wyoming; Cheyenne LEADS; the Wyoming Business Council; Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power; and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

The facility is located in the North Range Business Park in Cheyenne, Wyoming.