HPE Awarded $35 Million Contract for HPC at National Center for Atmospheric Research

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was awarded a $35+ million contract to build a HPC for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a US federally funded R&D center focusing on advancing knowledge of geosciences, including meteorology, climate change, and solar activity.

Variable resolution climate simulation performed at NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center shows landfalling hurricane.

The new system will be installed later this year at the National Center of Atmospheric Research – Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, WY, and put into use in 2022. It is a significant upgrade to NCAR’s existing system, Cheyenne, running on HPE’s HPC solutions, which include compute, storage, networking and software and delivering nearly 3.5x faster speed. Latest system design will help NCAR process compute and image-intensive data to create digital models of various occurrences, from wildfires and solar storms to hurricanes and droughts, with greater accuracy.

NCAR tackling weather predictions for up to 10 years with next-gen HPC
“This new system, powered by HPE, is a major step forward in supercomputing power, providing the scientific community with the most cutting-edge technology to better understand the Earth system,” said Anke Kamrath, director, computational and information systems laboratory, NACAR. “The resulting research will lead to new insights into potential threats ranging from severe weather and solar storms to climate change, helping to advance the knowledge needed for improved predictions that will strengthen society’s resilience to potential disasters.“

Transforming Research in Geosciences with Next-Gen HPC
The system will be powered by HPE Cray EX supercomputer, which is a purposefully engineered HPC architecture to enable large, next-ge HPC, including exascale systems, and features the latest compute and dedicated AI performance. NCAR will use the system to tackle research in a range of earth’s phenomenal events, including determining how to make some predictions up to a decade in advance.

Example research includes:

• Improving predictions of seasonal water supply, drought risk and flooding through detailed modeling and forecasting tools to inform water management experts, public utilities and farmers to help manage water resources.
• Managing wildfire risk by simulating complex representations of physical processes in a given region, which can help forecasts in wooded areas that are becoming increasingly prone to severe wildfires such as in California and Colorado or in countries like Argentina, Australia and Indonesia. Simulations will factor in data from local winds and air density, soil moisture, and vegetation patterns such as types of grass and leaves.
• Foreseeing hazards and impacts of climate change from extreme weather conditions such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Better understanding patterns and processes involved helps narrow in radius of these forthcoming natural events.
• Understanding the dangers of solar storms using detailed, 3D simulations of the sun’s turbulent plasma flows and magnetic fields to enable predictions of potential solar impact that can disrupt the earth’s atmosphere and trigger space weather events that threaten communications systems and power grids.

“We are inspired by leading R&D centers, such as NCAR, in their research efforts of applying high-performance computing to understanding earth systems, including severe weather events and wildfires, that lead to informed decisions in earth’s keeping people safe and preserving ecosystems,” said Bill Mannel, VP and GM, HPC, HPE. “We are honored to have been selected by NCAR to build its next-generation supercomputer that will tackle complex computational research for a range of geosciences while also making it easier for researchers to store and make that data accessible to help communities make smarter decisions.“

Inside NCAR’s New HPC
HPE will integrate the following HPC technologies with its Cray EX HPC to enable a advanced system with a theoretical peak performance of 19.87 petaflops:

• Expanded storage to support and share complex workloads in modeling, simulation and AI using the Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system
• Purpose-built HPC networking using HPE Slingshot to address demands for higher speed and congestion control for data-intensive workloads
• Integrated software suite to optimize HPC and AI applications using the HPE Cray Programming Environment
• Powerful compute to improve modeling and simulation using 2nd and 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors
• Targeted AI capabilities to support data and image-intensive workloads using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA AI and HPC software which provide SDKs that contain AI frameworks, compilers, libraries, models and tools for compute acceleration

NCAR’s new system is funded by the National Science Foundation, an independent agency of the US government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering.

About new system: New NCAR-Wyoming supercomputer to accelerate scientific discovery