Cyberinfrastructure procurement, deployment, and operations
Delivered to NCAR in April 2008, bluefire
was the first IBM Power 575 supercomputer to be shipped anywhere in the
world. It is over three times more powerful and three times more energy
efficient than the supercomputers it replaces. Entering full production
in early FY2009, bluefire will be used to improve climate and weather
simulations, study solar processes, gain a deeper understanding of
turbulence, and refine oceanic and atmospheric circulation models. CISL
continues to provide the numerical simulation community with resources
that offer the best combination of computational capability and capacity
that can be used effectively.
NCAR maintains a comprehensive computational environment to satisfy the
center's strategic goal to "Provide robust, accessible, and innovative
information services and tools" to universities and the broader scientific
community. This facility supports the NCAR strategic priority of "Enhancing
capability and capacity of NCAR supercomputing." Within the context of the
NCAR Strategic Plan, CISL fulfills these responsibilities and provides
robust computational and scientific data services including:
- High performance production computing
- Data analysis and visualization
- Data storage and archival
- Network connectivity
- Cultivation of the research data archive
- Data distribution
CISL also actively participates in projects designed to provide advanced services and tools to enable Earth System science for a diverse community of users:
- TeraGrid integration
- Experimental computing systems
- Earth System Knowledge Environment
During FY2008 NCAR took delivery of the first IBM Power 575 supercomputer with the POWER6 compute processor to be installed worldwide. Named bluefire, the deployment represented the second phase of the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation (ICESS) contract with IBM. It nearly tripled the compute capacity, over FY2007 levels, available to scientists.
During the first quarter of FY2009 several projects will be afforded the opportunity to study challenging problems by participating in the Accelerated Scientific Discovery Program (ASD) on bluefire, where large amounts of capability computing resources will be dedicated to a few users. CISL is committed to deploying and maintaining an end-to-end computational environment, and during FY2009 will enhance the data analysis and visualization environment by significantly increasing the amount of online disk storage available to scientists.
NCAR's supercomputers are managed by CISL under the UCAR/NSF Cooperative Agreement and are supported by NSF Core funds including CSL funding.