The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is getting ready for a big new IBM iDataPlex system named “YellowStone” that will give them 1.6 Petaflop of HPC goodness along with 149.2 TB of RAM across 74,592 Intel cores (with Sandy Bridge). Press releases like these come regularly, but this one actually makes note of how they plan to manage the massive amounts of simulation data coming from the system. They’ve setup a dedicated 17PetaByte filesystem shared between YellowStone and a pair of dedicated Analysis & Visualization systems.
The DAV resource is made up of two systems, one designed to facilitate large-scale data analysis, and the other for parallel processing and visualization activities. Taken together, these components will dramatically improve capabilities central to NCAR’s mission, such as climate modeling, forecasting, and preservation of critical research data. The NWSC will serve researchers across the United States and around the world who will interact with its systems remotely.
Nice to see the visualization aspect in the same press release as the computational announcement. Apparently we have their director to thank for some of this:
CISL director Al Kellie emphasizes the importance of the integrated computing resource, explaining that what makes this system exceptional for geoscience research is the linking of a very large centralized file and data storage system to a high-performance computational cluster and visualization resource. “While we wanted to make sure we had adequate computing capacity, we knew that it would be of limited use if we didn’t ensure easy access to the data and appropriate resources for storing and analyzing it,” Kellie says. “In addition to high-performance machines, researchers need quick access to their data and a way to analyze it, to see what it means. This system addresses those needs elegantly.”
via HPCwire: NCAR to Install 1.6 Petaflop IBM Supercomputer.
