Cool Technology, Blazing Speed: Bluefire Pushes NCAR Computing to the Next Level
Supercomputers are a powerful tool scientists use for answering complex scientific questions of importance to society, such as where and when dangerous storms may strike. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR’s computing capabilities were significantly enhanced by the addition of a powerful IBM supercomputer named bluefire More than three times more powerful and energy efficient than the supercomputers it replaces, bluefire is a million times more powerful than the first recognized supercomputer, the Cray 1-A that NCAR used from 1977 to 1986. to NCAR’s supercomputer center. Bluefire is the latest system in NCAR’s 30-year tradition of providing high performance computing to the atmospheric sciences community, and it began its service ranked as the 30th most powerful computer in the world.
More than three times more powerful and three times more energy efficient than the supercomputers it replaces, bluefire is a million times more powerful than the first recognized supercomputer, the Cray 1-A that NCAR used from 1977 to 1986. Bluefire is composed of IBM’s latest generation of processors: the POWER 6 is the world's fastest microprocessor with a clock speed of 4.7 GHz. With 4,064 processors and a peak speed of more than 76 teraflops (76 trillion floating-point operations per second), bluefire will support the simulation needs of geosciences researchers for years.
Bluefire will play a central role in supporting and accelerating climate change research, studying changes in future patterns of precipitation and drought around the world, changes to agriculture and growing seasons, and the complex influence of global warming on hurricanes, among many other research questions. "Bluefire is on the leading edge of high-performance computing technology," said Tom Bettge, Director of Operations and Services in NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL). "Scientists will be able to conduct breakthrough calculations, study vital problems at much higher resolution and complexity, and get results more quickly than before."
Among the climate simulations run on bluefire are those that NCAR and community scientists will provide to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In addition, 12 million processor hours have been allotted by the NSF-appointed Climate Simulation Laboratory Allocation Panel to 13 projects that will take place between 2008 and 2010 in support of the multi-agency Climate Change Science Program.
