HPCwire: DOE to Provide Supercomputing for NOAA

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

September 08, 2008

DOE to Provide Supercomputing for NOAA

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 -- The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science will make available more than 10 million hours of computing time for the U.S. Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to explore advanced climate change models at three of DOE's national laboratories as part of a three-year memorandum of understanding on collaborative climate research signed today by the two agencies.

NOAA will work with climate change models as well as perform near real-time high-impact (non-production) weather prediction research using computing time on DOE Office of Science resources including two of the world's top five most powerful computers -- the Argonne National Laboratory's 557 TF IBM Blue Gene/P and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's 263 TF Cray XT4. NOAA researchers will also receive time on DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Advanced, high-resolution climate models from NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) will be prototyped and compared to other models like the NSF-DOE sponsored Community Climate System Model. This partnership is also consistent with the goals of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which is responsible for facilitating the creation and application of knowledge of Earth's global environment through research, observations, decision support, and communication. NOAA and DOE scientists play key roles in national and international assessments, for example, the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Under the agreement, the Office of Science and NOAA will work together to "improve the quality of and quantify the uncertainty of climate and weather prediction, including improving the prediction of high-impact weather events to provide the best science-based climate and weather information for management and policy decisions."

"The Energy Department computers will provide a unique platform for studying the efficiency, scalability, and throughput characteristics of our NOAA climate models. We can systematically compare it to other climate models and evaluate its simulations against data collected by atmospheric radiation measurements," said retired Navy Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator.

"The collaboration under this MOU will enable our country to take leadership in both regional and global climate change prediction, enhancing our ability to develop national policy," said DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr. Raymond L. Orbach. "This will also improve weather prediction to help protect lives and property, as well as the nation's energy infrastructure."

DOE's Office of Science supports research, including climate modeling to: improve understanding of factors affecting the Earth's radiant-energy balance; predict accurately any global and regional climate change induced by increasing atmospheric concentrations of aerosols and greenhouse gases; quantify sources and sinks of energy-related greenhouse gases; and improve the scientific basis for assessing both the potential consequences of climatic changes and the benefits and costs of alternative response options.

NOAA looks forward to working with DOE's technical staff and applying advanced, computationally expensive climate models prototyped on DOE systems to address crucial climate change problems such as drought, water resources, and a rapidly changing Arctic.

"Such high-resolution simulations will give us a better understanding of the impact of cloud feedbacks on the sensitivity of climate to increased greenhouse gases and improve understanding of future trends in high-impact weather events," said Lautenbacher.

There is no transfer of funds under the agreement.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...

Cisco Containers Target Federal Market

Mar 15 | Data Center Knowledge | Company delivers UCS-container solution to NASA. Read more...

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html