This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has for several decades been the principal provider of high-performance computing (HPC), data storage resources, software engineering and visualization tools for the atmospheric and related sciences community. NCAR's supercomputing resources have been housed in the NCAR Mesa Laboratory since the 1960s. This facility is now approaching obsolescence as power and other limitations mean it will soon be unable to support the high-power HPC and data-storage systems that researchers need in order to develop and run increasingly sophisticated models of the climate, weather and Earth systems. UCAR (NCAR's managing organization) and a group of Wyoming entities that includes the University and State of Wyoming have formed a partnership to construct a new facility, the NCAR- Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC), near Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is anticipated that the NWSC will become operational during 2011.
This award will support the NWSC Project Office (NPO), operated by NCAR, during the design, construction and commissioning phases of the project. The NPO will be essential for the effective planning, design and implementation of the project, ensuring best value for the government and other stakeholders, providing clear, centralized control of costs and schedules, and maximizing the future capabilities available to the scientific community. A key objective of the NPO is to ensure that the NWSC is an environmentally sustainable facility, becoming a showcase of energy efficiency and green technologies.
The NWSC will support NSF's cyberinfrastructure vision and the Foundation's efforts to create a national petascale cyberinfrastructure for the sciences and engineering. It will be a supercomputing facility for the atmospheric and related sciences community that will provide U.S. researchers in the atmospheric and related sciences with the tools they urgently need in order to remain internationally competitive. It will provide petascale computing resources equal to the demands of the increasingly complex, high resolution Earth System models that are being developed to address some of the most pressing scientific questions facing us today.
The project is a unique and transformative partnership between U.S. research and academic institutions, private industry, and local, state, and federal governments. Construction of the facility in Wyoming will support intellectual and cyberinfrastructure capacity-building in an area of the country that, like many other EPSCoR states, has traditionally been neglected in terms of cyberinfrastructure development. Close ties to the local community will ensure that modeling work undertaken at the NWSC includes research projects that will lead to a better understanding of important scientific questions that directly impact people in the State.
