NCAR Selects IBM for HPC in Wyoming

The National Center for Atmospheric
Research (NCAR) announced that IBM Corp. will install 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.

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

"The vision for Yellowstone
parallels the principles that have guided the design of the NWSC,"
says NCAR director Roger Wakimoto. "In
both instances, we have taken an approach that maximizes the science we can do
and the benefit of that science to society."

The NWSC 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, located in the North Range Business Park in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was
designed with sustainability and flexibility in mind so it can be easily
adapted to future technologies and changing requirements in scientific
computing. Construction and commissioning was completed last month.

"We join our partners at NCAR and in Cheyenne in great anticipation as the supercomputer
project nears completion," says University of Wyoming
president Tom Buchanan. "Our faculty
are poised to take full advantage of all that the center will bring to our
educational and research endeavors in Earth system sciences; atmospheric,
hydrological and computational sciences; mathematics; and engineering. The
outcomes will enhance science and technology throughout Wyoming and the nation."

Details
of the new system
Yellowstone
is an IBM iDataPlex supercomputer system, consisting of Intel Sandy Bridge EP
processors and a Mellanox FDR InfiniBand full fat tree. It will have 149.2
terabytes of memory, 74,592 processor cores, and a peak computational rate of
1.6 petaflops.

The central
file and data storage resource will consist of file system servers and storage
devices that are linked to the data analysis and visualization (DAV) resources
and to the supercomputer systems. These centralized file systems will allow
scientists to generate model output on the supercomputer and then analyze or
visualize it on the DAV resource, without the usual bottleneck when moving such
large quantities of data between separate systems.

Yellowstone’s
central file system will have nearly 17 petabytes of usable disk space, 12
times what is available to NCAR’s scientific research community today.

The DAV
resource is made up of two systems, one designed to facilitate large-scale data
analysis, and the other for parallel processing and visualization activities.

Taken
together, these components will improve capabilities central to
NCAR’s mission, such as climate modeling, forecasting, and preservation of
critical research data. The NWSC will serve researchers across the United States
and around the world who will interact with its systems remotely.

"NCAR has a longstanding tradition for
excellence in deploying resources to address unique challenges requiring
high-performance computing capabilities," says David Jursik, vice
president of high-performance computing at IBM. "Yellowstone will substantially expand NCAR’s ability to investigate
climate change, severe weather events, and other important subjects. We are
pleased to be selected as IBM continues to pursue high-performance computing
for the purpose of helping scientists and leading decision makers address
critical issues for a smarter planet."

CISL
director Al Kellie emphasizes the importance of the integrated computing
resource, explaining that what makes this system exceptional for geoscience
research is the linking of a very large centralized file and data storage
system to a high-performance computational cluster and visualization resource.

"While we wanted to make sure we had adequate
computing capacity, we knew that it would be of limited use if we didn’t ensure
easy access to the data and appropriate resources for storing and analyzing it,"
Kellie says. "In addition to
high-performance machines, researchers need quick access to their data and a
way to analyze it, to see what it means. This system addresses those needs
elegantly."