Monday, 6 November 2006

IBM Debuts Supercomputer for Climate, Weather Research

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has installed a new IBM supercomputer, known as ‘blueice’, that nearly triples the centre’s sustained computing capacity, as per a statement issued by IBM. With a peak speed of 12 teraflops (12 trillion floating-point operations per second), the new machine will enable scientists to enhance the resolution and complexity of Earth system models, improve climate and weather research, and provide more accurate data to decision makers, the company said.

blueice, which is the first phase of a system called the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation (ICESS), is undergoing acceptance testing and will begin operations in February 2007. A second phase of ICESS will be installed in 2008. ICESS will provide computing support for the geosciences until mid-2011.

"The increased production capacity of blueice will allow us to further enhance our computational campaigns," says Tom Bettge, director of Operations and Services for NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. "Scientists will be able to address capability problems in turbulence, nested regional climate modeling, and ocean modelling, as well as in near real-time numerical weather forecasting. They'll be able to scale their codes into larger problem sizes or increase the complexity of the physics in their simulations."