Production supercomputing
Estimated sustained computing
capacity (in teraflops) available to the NCAR community over the past 10
years. On average, CISL provides substantial capacity increases every 16
months to meet the scientific research demands of the community.
Average utilization (defined as
the percent of compute nodes assigned to users at any one time) of the
production computing platforms provided by CISL. During the time period
shown, the major IBM systems (blackforest, bluesky, bluevista, blueice,
and bluefire) were deployed on schedule and reached nearly 90% utilization
within a few months. Keeping scientific production at a high level meets
NCAR's goal of providing reliable and robust computational services to the
community.
To fulfill its mission, CISL strives to provide a balanced computational
environment to facilitate scientific research. This includes robust,
reliable, effective, and efficient production supercomputing, state-of-the-art
storage, data analysis, and data visualization services, and numerous other
computational tools for its community of users.
Within the realm of production supercomputing, CISL's goals are to provide equitable access to reliable computing resources with minimal user wait times, while maximizing resource utilization. These goals are achieved by maintaining and monitoring a proper balance of resource allocation, prioritized job scheduling, a well-tuned queue structure, and single-job resource limits.
CISL works to increase the computational capacity available to the community on a regular basis. Deployment of the IBM Power 575 system bluefire during FY2008 provided nearly a three-fold increase in computing capacity over the amount delivered during FY2007. Upgrades and enhancements to peripheral resources, which complement and supplement the high-end computing environment, are applied to appropriately match the growth in compute capacity.
The compute capacity available for scientific research will remain level during FY2009. Enhancements are planned that will significantly increase the amount of online, readily accessible data storage for analysis and visualization to meet the demands of the community.
This work fulfills NCAR's strategic priority of "Enhancing capability and capacity of NCAR supercomputing" and is supported by NSF Core funds, including CSL funding.