New supercomputer at ORNL to be used for climate research
Wednesday July 28, 2010
Supercomputer that will be used exclusively for climate research...
With the recent arrival of a Cray XT6 supercomputer that will be used exclusively for climate research, Oak Ridge National Laboratory now houses the top computers of three federal agencies - the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"We're pretty proud of what we've been able to accomplish," ORNL's Buddy Bland said. "East Tennessee is clearly becoming the computing capital of the world."
The Cray XT6, which belongs to NOAA, is the baby of the bunch, and it's just getting started.
The initial system will have a peak capability of 260 teraflops - 260 trillion calculations per second. That's nowhere near the power of Jaguar, the world's fastest computer, and Kraken, No. 4 in the world, two other Cray machines that share the same room on the first floor of ORNL's National Center for Computational Science.
But, according to Bland, the NOAA machine will do just fine and get even better as it's expanded and upgraded over the next year. "This is going to be a terrific machine for climate research," he said.
The supercomputer is part of a five-year, $215 million agreement between ORNL and NOAA. ORNL will house the supercomputer at its center and lend additional expertise, operational and otherwise, to NOAA's dedicated research on climate change.
ORNL's agreement with NOAA is to have the machine operational by Oct. 1, and Bland said that shouldn't be a problem.
"We're working on trying to beat that deadline," he said.
Next summer, ORNL will get another 22 cabinets for the NOAA research effort. Those will be the Cray XE6 system with a next-generation processor, Bland said.
Those cabinets will have a projected peak capability of 721 teraflops. Even when combined with the 14 earlier cabinets, the total peak will be less than a petaflop (1,000 trillion calculations per second), but Bland said late in calendar 2011 those 14 original cabinets will be upgraded to bring the total system's peak to 1.1 petaflops.
Once that occurs, ORNL will probably be the only place on the planet with three petascale machines.
According to lab officials, bringing together the resources of multiple federal agencies is an attempt to better leverage taxpayer spending and maximize the opportunities.
The work on climate is an example of that.
In an interview last year, Thomas Zacharia, ORNL's deputy director for science and technology, hailed the newly signed agreement with NOAA.
"We will assemble the resources and the people and will support them in developing next-generation climate models to take advantage of petaflops-and-beyond computers, which is something DOE has asked us to do, and move the science forward," Zacharia said.
Source: Knoxville News Sentinel
