NASA Installs New Supercomputers To Better Cast The Weather

TECH SPACE

CSC's High Performance Computing Center of Excellence, which has installed some of the largest computer systems in the world, is the U.S. Department of Defense's largest systems integrator for the High Performance Computing Modernization Program Office. The CSC Center addresses supercomputing integration and outsourcing needs for government and commercial clients. With more than 250 experts providing the skill and knowledge of all supercomputing technology areas, the center has installed and operates systems that support thousands of users in science and technology.

File photo - source reference

El Segundo - July 22, 2002
Predicting climate conditions and weather accurately all of the time may still be impossible, but scientists appear to be getting closer to this elusive goal.

Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are now using one of the world's largest supercomputers to evaluate the Earth's climate and predict the effects of events such as volcanic eruptions and global warming on the weather.

NASA engineers, working with El Segundo, Calif.-based Computer Sciences Corporation, installed and integrated a HP AlphaServer SC45supercomputer at NASA's Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), located at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

With the new computing capabilities, NASA scientists will be able to increase the accuracy of their predictions of the effects of climate changes, such as how much the Earth's temperature will rise in the future or where an approaching hurricane will go.

"Using the information from NASA's Earth- observing satellites to make more quantitative assessments of climate change and its relation to weather is a key part of NASA's Science strategy," said Dr. Richard Rood, Acting Chief of NASA's Earth and Space Data Computing Division.

In December of 2000, NASA, working with the General Services Administration Millennia contract, awarded a seven-year contract to CSC to help the agency achieve a 32-fold improvement in computational power for climate prediction. The installation of the new HP system marks the first step towards achieving the agency's goal.

"NASA scientists sought to improve their climate modeling and simulation capabilities," said Bob Scudamore, vice president of CSC's High Performance Computing Center of Excellence.

"This objective drove the requirements for greater computational power, memory and data storage. With this new technology in place, NASA scientists will be better able to understand the Earth's systems and improve our predictions of climate, weather and natural hazards."

CSC's High Performance Computing Center of Excellence installed the 512-processor HP SC45supercomputer at the NCCS. The system, which Scudamore estimates is one of the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world, more than doubles the center's current capacity.

CSC also installed a 32-processor HP SC45 system at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City as part of the Agency's overall computational plan. The new system will enable scientists to pursue climatic research at the Goddard Institute.

This September, CSC will help NASA increase its computing power further as it expands the center's computational capability another three fold with the installation of 880 additional processors to the existing HP system at Goddard Space Flight Center.

INTERNET SPACE

Computer Grid Reaches Tera-Scale

West Lafayette - Jun 17, 2002
Purdue University and Indiana University have succeeded in linking their IBM supercomputers in a computational grid via the universities' high-speed optical network, creating a facility capable of performing a trillion operations per second.

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