NCAR and partners in the State of Wyoming propose to build and operate a new supercomputing facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) will house massively parallel petascale computers and mass data storage archives that will enable researchers in the geosciences to achieve dramatic increases in the resolution of Earth System Science models, improve the representations of modeled physical processes, run model simulations covering longer periods of time and produce better statistics. Regional climate simulations with nested grids at meteorological resolutions will become feasible, enabling scientists to investigate the connection between climate and hurricane frequency and strength, study the localized effects of regional climate change on agriculture and water supplies, and investigate numerous other computationally demanding Earth System processes.
The proposed facility will have the power, space, and cooling capacity to support a 1.0 to 1.5 petaflops peak system with an expected data production rate of 23-35 petabytes per year by 2012. This will provide a 15- to 20-fold increase over computing resources currently available to the community at NCAR. This system will be integrated with the cyberinfrastructure (CI) of NSF's TeraGrid eXtreme Digital (XD), the Track-1 'Blue Waters' system, and the DataNet program. The facility will be well connected to computing facilities operated by other Federal agencies such as DOE, NOAA, and NASA as well as high-performance computing systems located at colleges and universities. The NWSC will be a showcase of sustainable design and construction, and will be a world-leader in energy-efficient cyberinfrastructure.
Broader impacts of the proposed work include the deployment of high-performance CI within the NWSC that will enable researchers to perform high-resolution simulations of weather phenomena, global and regional climate, coastal oceans, sunspots, subsurface flow, and more. Earth System research and education will be transformed by the NWSC, as the next generation of Earth science researchers and computational scientists will be attracted by the importance of the problem and the scale of the facilities available to them. Current and planned education, outreach, and training programs built around the facility will help to broaden the impact of the NWSC project on both regional and national scales. Integration of the NWSC with other NSF high-performance CI will provide important linkages with other resource providers and will directly support NSF's vision of a transformative national petascale cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering. Finally, the NWSC has the potential to contribute to economic development in the State of Wyoming in the form of well-paying jobs, workforce training opportunities, and in the transformation of the state into a destination of choice for other high-technology enterprises. Through the facility partnership with Wyoming, these benefits can be extended to other EPSCoR states as well.
Over the past several years, researchers have argued persuasively for the provision of dedicated petascale resources needed by investigators in the geosciences to tackle ever more complex Earth System science questions. Due in part to the alarming long-term and global threats posed by climate change, calls for sharply increasing the amount of computational resources provided to the Earth System science community have increased in frequency and insistence. Current computing limitations have been noted as well, with researchers indicating that priorities identified for computational research have, to date, been limited by inadequate resources. In order to address these limitations and enable the next series of advances in the Earth System sciences, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and partners in the State of Wyoming proposed to build and operate the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The facility, completed in October 2012, has the power, space, and cooling capacity to support the deployment of a 4 MW supercomputer, sufficient to provision a 1.0 to 1.5 petaflops peak system with an expected data production rate of 23-35 petabytes per year. The petascale system, Yellowstone, deployed within the NWSC will provide a 15- to 20-fold increase over computing resources currently available to the community at NCAR. This system is capable of being well integrated with the cyberinfrastructure (CI) of NSF’s TeraGrid eXtreme Digital (XD), the Track-1 "Blue Waters" system, and the DataNet program. The facility is also connected to computing facilities operated by other Federal agencies such as DOE, NOAA, and NASA as well as high performance computing systems located at colleges and universities. The main components consist of a massive central file and data storage system, a high performance computational cluster, and a system for visualizing the data. Located in Cheyenne’s North Range Business Park, near the intersection of I-80 and I-25, the 153,000-square-foot supercomputing center will provide advanced computing services to scientists across the United States. Most researchers will interact with the center remotely, via a laptop or desktop computer and the Internet. In alignment with the environmental stewardship mission of NCAR and one of the key Wyoming partners, the University of Wyoming (UW), the NWSC has been designed to be maximally energy efficient. The NWSC was awarded LEED Gold certification for its sustainable design. The center takes full advantage of Cheyenne’s elevation and cool, dry climate by employing ambient air to cool the facility nearly year round. This will significantly reduce the facility's energy use. A minimum of 10 percent of the power provided to the facility will be wind energy from the nearby Happy Jack Wind Farm. NCAR will continue to explore options to increase the percentage of renewable energy provided to the facility in future years. The intellectual merit of this activity resides in the fact that the massively parallel computers and associated Cyberinfrastructure (CI) housed within the NWSC will enable geosciences investigators to achieve dramatic improvements in model resolution, better physical process representations, longer simulation lengths, and better statistics for a broad spectrum of important Earth System science applications. Regional climate simulations with nested grids at meteorological resolutions will become feasible, enabling scientists to investigate the connection between climate and hurricane frequency and strength, study the localized effects of regional climate change on agriculture and water supplies, and investigate numerous other computationally demanding Earth System processes. Broader impacts of the activity include the deployment of high-performance CI within the NWSC that will enable researchers to perform high-resolution simulations of weather phenomena, global and regional climate, coastal oceans, sunspots, subsurface flow, and more. Earth System research and education will be transformed by the NWSC, as the next generation of Earth science researchers and computational scientists will be attracted by the importance of the problem and the scale of the facilities available to them. Current and planned education, outreach, and training programs built around the facility will help to broaden the impact of the NWSC project on both regional and national scales. Integration of the NWSC with other NSF high-performance CI will provide important linkages with other resource providers and will directly support NSF’s vision of a transformative national petascale cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering. Finally, the NWSC has the potential to contribute to economic development in the State of Wyoming in the form of well-paying jobs, workforce training opportunities, and in the transformation of the state into a destination of choice for other high-technology enterprises. Through the facility partnership with Wyoming, these benefits can be extended to other EPSCoR states as well. More information about this project can be found at: http://nwsc.ucar.edu/
