NCAR’s supercomputer being installed

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – The facility-testing phase at the new National Center for Atmospheric Research-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne is complete. Now it’s time to give the building its brain power: 1,368 highly efficient servers worth $25 million.

The 19 server racks for Yellowstone, the name given to the IBM-fabricated supercomputer, began arriving at the facility last week. Workers have started maneuvering the racks, which will comprise the server cluster, into the supercomputer room called Module B.

With the arrival of IBM’s ultra-efficient iDataPlex processors, and the networks operation center already online, the building is starting to come alive.

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“We’re learning something every day about how this building functions,´ said Aaron Andersen, deputy director of the Operations and Services Division at the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research. “This is an intelligent building – the building itself is like a computer. The whole thing is a big sensor, and the individual sensors tie everything together.”

Yellowstone’s server cluster will provide the massive computing horsepower that scientists nationwide will employ to study Earth-system processes including weather, oceanography, air pollution, climate, space weather, energy production, seismology, carbon sequestration, computational science and other geosciences topics. In addition to the server cluster, Yellowstone will integrate a massive data-storage facility and a special system for visualizing scientific data.

“This is exciting,” Andersen said. “We’ve been planning this for at least seven years. It’s like game day, and now we’re putting everything into play that originated on the whiteboard. We came at this with a blank sheet and challenged a lot of assumptions. This facility is truly world class.”

In the coming weeks, technicians will continue to install and secure Yellowstone’s 19 server racks that each holds 72 individual servers. Then they will embed 12 miles of cabling and wiring to complete the ecosystem, which takes time. By July, the technicians plan to fire up Yellowstone and put it through its paces. If all goes well, researchers and scientists will be using Yellowstone to aid scientific studies by September, just before the NWSC grand opening on Oct. 15.

University of Wyoming researchers in Laramie will benefit greatly from NWCS. Some UW faculty members with specific research projects already are in line to use the facility. Po Chen, a UW School of Energy Resources associate professor of geology and physics, will use Yellowstone to model seismic events to improve earthquake warning systems.

“In the modern scientific world, computational science is playing an increasingly more important role,´ said Chad Baldwin, director of Institutional Communications at UW. “Our partnership in the NWSC will give UW researchers access to what may be the largest computing capacity of any university in the nation. It will make it possible for UW researchers to attract more research funding; it will increase UW’s ability to recruit top-flight faculty from across the world; and it will raise UW’s profile as a research university.”

Yellowstone will run at 1.5 petaflops – 1.5 quadrillion calculations per second. To give perspective on how much data that is, if 7 billion people – roughly Earth’s population – each performed one calculation per day, it would take more than 587 years to do what Yellowstone will do in one second. At present, a 1.5-petaflop system ranks among the world’s 10 fastest supercomputers.