IBM today announced that the University
of California at Irvine (UCI) has selected a powerful IBM supercomputer
that will enable researchers to model and predict changes to
the Earth's surface, atmosphere and oceans up to 300 years
into the future.
The powerful new supercomputer, dubbed the Earth System Modeling Facility
(ESMF), will be used by researchers at UC Irvine's Department of Earth
System Science (ESS) to simulate climate changes and gain answers to
critical questions such as how global warming, man-made pollutants, polar-ice
movements, and chemical cycles will impact the Earth and its inhabitants
over the next few centuries.
ÒEarth's weather and climate result from an intricate and complex interplay
of physical, chemical and biological processes of the atmosphere, oceans,
and land surface; they are crucial components of the global environment
that supports life on Earth,Ó said Charles Zender, assistant professor
of Earth system science at UCI. ÒThe ESMF IBM Supercomputer is designed
to provide sustained compute capability, speed and storage capacity necessary
to best meet the challenges involved in understanding the atmosphere
and its interactions with the Earth system, as well as developing methods
for predicting its behavior. The ESMF will also allow researchers to
pursue data-intensive research utilizing the large geophysical datasets
from current and next generation numerical models and satellite observations.Ó
ÒThis supercomputer will give UC Irvine the speed and performance they
need to push Earth system research to a new level - these researchers
and scientists are pursuing very important research across a broad spectrum
of environmental conditions that affect us all,Ó said Dave Turek, vice
president, Deep Computing, IBM. ÒThe IBM supercomputer, made up of IBM
eServer pSeries systems with POWER microprocessors, provide the complex
computational capabilities needed to help UCI researchers produce realistic
simulations and analyses as the study of long term effects of global
warming becomes more critical.Ó
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The ESMF supercomputer is one
the most powerful computing systems at the University of California,
capable of calculating 528 gigaFLOPS (a billion floating-point
operations per second). The supercomputer consists of seven
IBM eServer p655 systems, each with eight POWER4+ª microprocessors,
all connected together with IBM's clustering technology, and
one IBM eServer p690, with thirty-two POWER4+ microprocessors,
running AIX¨, IBM's UNIX¨ operating system.
Having been termed the first Òserver on a chip,Ó IBM continues to invest
in the POWER architecture to offer customers open, innovative technology
solutions through the AIX, OS/400 or Linux operating systems that complement
the growing demand for 64-bit applications. IBM's family of POWER microprocessors
are among the most widely used in the industry. In addition to being
the force behind IBM's pSeries, iSeries and BladeCenter JS20 servers,
the microprocessor technology can be found in Nintendo game consoles,
Apple computers, and some of the world's most powerful supercomputers
and storage systems.
The ESMF storage solution is based on dual, IBM xSeries 335 servers leveraging
Red Hat Linux and Sistina Global File System (GFS). Disk storage consists
of 32 terabytes of RAID5. This low-cost, single-namespace file system
is modular, robust and scaleable yet provides adequate read-write bandwidth
for gigabyte data-file sizes.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of
California, the ESMF will power a wide spectrum of Earth-system modeling
(ESM) projects conducted by Earth system science professors, researchers,
students and collaborators. The Facility is devoted to the fundamental
understanding of the coupled physical climate, chemistry, and biogeochemical
cycles of the Earth system associated with global change. The knowledge
gained at UC Irvine feeds into national climate modeling efforts. |
