A new supercomputer exclusively designed for climate science research is being launched by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“It was a unique period of time that made purchasing a system of this size very challenging,” Chris Fuson, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA program manager said in a press release issued on April 12.
This latest system, named Gaea, will be the fifth supercomputer installed and operated by the National Climate-Computing Research Center (NCRC) at ORNL, the release reports. Since 2010, the NCRC has progressively installed a series of more powerful computers, all named Gaea, to meet the growing demands of climate science research.
A single cabinet of C5 can replace the computational power of C3, which has eight cabinets total, Paul Peltz, the ORNL technical lead for Gaea said, according to the press release. Power efficiency, CPU power and cooling efficiency increase significantly over time.
"Scientists load the system with application benchmarks and ensure the system can run with the expected performance,” Dan Dietz, an engineer in high-performance computing (HPC) engineer at ORNL, said in the news release.
“We slowly loaded up the number of copies of each benchmark running at once, easing on the gas to ensure the system doesn’t run into any issues under heavy load. We want to see consistent performance among all copies of the benchmark,” Dietz said.
Melesse Vergara, group leader for the System Acceptance and User Environment group, said find and fixing problems before opening the system to users is rewarding. If they do their jobs properly, users will be able to use the system without major challenges. Often users are unaware of the bugs their teams fixed before access was available.
“ORNL is a custodian of the machine for NOAA,” Peltz said, the release reported. “We provide strong HPC knowledge and top-class facilities, and we invest heavily in our ability to house these machines in a secure manner. Those are things that NOAA doesn’t have to worry about. This interoperability between agencies is great.”
