NCAR’s scientific research programs work to provide more accurate advance warning of extreme weather, more skillful prediction of space weather events, and making better projections about regional impacts of global climate change. Toward this end, NCAR provisions, operates, and maintains supercomputing facilities and cyberinfrastructure to advance our understanding of the atmospheric and related sciences. Meeting the challenge of providing facilities sufficient for this research is fundamental to NCAR's fourth strategic goal.
NCAR designs, develops, and maintains community models, modeling frameworks, and data analysis and visualization tools that are openly available to the community. In addition, NCAR collaborates with the community on research activities in computational science, applied mathematics, and geostatistics. These efforts are pursued with the aim of developing novel, improved techniques for attacking key scientific problems and providing meaningful results for society.
NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory is a world leader in supercomputing and cyberinfrastructure, providing services to more than 60 UCAR member universities, as well as NCAR and the larger geosciences community. CISL also performs basic and applied research in IT, computational science, and mathematics.
NCAR addresses four broad priorities within this goal:
The hallmark of supercomputing at NCAR has been provision of robust, reliable, effective, and efficient production computing with state-of-the-art storage, data analysis, data visualization services and tools for the user community. CISL increases the computational capacity available to our scientific community on a regular basis. Peripheral resources that complement and supplement the high-end computing environment are upgraded and enhanced as appropriate to match the growth in compute capacity.
Read more about this priorityFor nearly 50 years, NCAR has provided a computational environment to satisfy the institution's overall mission of providing robust, reliable, accessible, innovative, and advanced services to the university community and the broader scientific community. NCAR also advances atmospheric science by creating integrated software and data system services that are at the heart of today's state-of-the-art observing systems. We provide classic computational services through our high performance computing production environment with mass storage, network connectivity, data analysis, visualization, research data stewardship, and data distribution services. In addition, NCAR continually evaluates opportunities to provide services designed to enable Earth System science for the entire community of users such as TeraGrid integration, experimental computing systems, and an Earth system knowledge environment. NCAR continually improves its observational data products and services to increase overall functionality, accessibility, reliability, and ease of maintenance. This work often has broad community impacts when the technologies are shared and distributed to outside users and agencies.
Read more about this priorityThe research activity within CISL enhances the computational infrastructure at NCAR and supports more efficient scientific computation and simulation. This research is necessary to maintain an innovative computational facility and to lead the geophysics community in incorporating new numerical methods and models. Given this broad priority, the research in CISL must span several disciplines and address computational science at many levels. Integrated with the computational science are areas of applied mathematics that include data analysis, models for multiscale processes, and techniques for assimilating data into numerical models. Because these different elements are coordinated through a single Lab, there is an easy transfer of technology and ideas from prototypes and theoretical results in IMAGe to implementation and workflow issues in CISL, and finally into tools and models for the communities served by CISL. There is also a valuable reverse transfer whereby emerging computational capability and data storage concepts spur particular research that takes advantage of these features.
Read more about this priorityNCAR continues to develop an Earth System Knowledge Environment (ESKE), new cyberinfrastructure that combines models, data, experiments, collaborative tools, and information resources in a way that fosters knowledge sharing and accelerates scientific workflow. NCAR is creating integrated, collaborative problem-solving environments that advance the community's ability to engage in research and scientific discovery. Efforts span modeling frameworks, data and knowledge management and access, collaboration, and analysis and visualization.
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