• NCAR Annual Report
• ASP report
• CISL report
• EOL report
• ESSL report
• RAL report

Supercomputer special campaigns

This year, CISL supported seven computing campaigns on the production supercomputer clusters, in addition to the Accelerated Scientific Discovery projects that began using the new IBM POWER6 system, bluefire, in August and September. The provision of large portions of new supercomputers, special queues, pre-emptive scheduling, consulting services, and operational workload monitoring to support breakthrough, on-demand and real-time computing, further enhances the production computing services provided by CISL to the NCAR, university, and Climate Simulation Laboratory (CSL) scientific user communities. Some computational campaigns recur annually, such as the hurricane real-time forecasts, while others are either a one-time event or are accommodated on an as-needed basis.

This chart tracks the usage of NCAR computational resources by special computing campaigns (On-Demand and early Accelerated Scientific Discovery usage) during FY2008. CISL's provision of significant computational resource to special campaigns is accelerating the pace of scientific discovery through numerical simulation.

While the NCAR production supercomputing environment provides capacity computing to NCAR, university, and CSL scientists, the special campaign mechanism supports ongoing and special computational projects and campaigns and on-demand capability computing.

The following table lists the special computational campaigns supported by CISL during FY2008. The Advanced Hurricane WRF Model campaign conducted real-time hurricane forecasting with an enhanced version of WRF during the 2007 hurricane season. The ICE-L was a joint project among NCAR's Earth & Sun Systems Laboratory's MMM, RAL, and ATD divisions in support of aircraft field experiments to measure ice particles in clouds. The ARCTAS computational campaign supported real-time daily chemical forecasts for the Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites project. Near real-time NWP with WRF-ARW was provided during the spring to support MMM's collaborations with the National Severe Storms Lab (NSSL) and the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) through their springtime Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) Experiment.

CISL provided remote access to the production Linux cluster (lightning) for Tiziana Cherubini (University of Hawaii) to continue operational, real-time weather forecasting for the Mauna Kea Observatory while a new computer system was being installed at her center. Davide Del Vento of CISL's Consulting Services Group helped her install model procedures and scripts on lightning. She reported that "The working environment seems to be the ideal one to run WRF [the Weather Research and Forecasting modeling system]. WRF has been running quite regularly since then, thanks particularly to CISL support." On-demand computing and consulting support was provided for the 2008 Advanced Studies Program Workshop on Numerical Techniques for Global Atmospheric Models. CISL provided access to the production Linux cluster to support real-time weather forecasting for the Mauna Kea Observatory (see sidebar). Additionally, CISL supported the NCAR Front Range Flash Flood Prediction System via provision of real-time computing resources.

During FY2009, approximately one-half of the new IBM POWER6 system bluefire will be dedicated to Accelerated Scientific Discovery projects during the first two months of the year. Additionally, CISL operations, consulting, and systems staff will continue to provide full 24x7 support for the special campaigns and on-demand, real-time computing throughout the year.

The special computing campaigns and provision of on-demand and real-time computing support the NCAR strategic priority of "Developing and providing advanced services and tools." This work is made possible through NSF Core funds, including CSL funding.