Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory installs Origin 3000 clusters with 1,152 processors to for weather codesMountain View 07 November 2000 Raytheon Company will SGI Origin 3000 supercomputers at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, N. J. The upgrade is expected to improve the US climate prediction and weather forecasting capabilities. Eight 128-processor Origin 3800 systems will form a large-scale cluster and two 64-processor Origin 3800 systems will serve as an analysis cluster. The smaller analysis cluster will also serve GFDL's data archive that is stored in three robotic tape libraries and is expected to reach 2 Petabyte in size by September 2003.
The SGI Origin 3800 systems will have the ability to perform more than 900
Gflop/s and will
have more than four times the performance of the three Cray computers that
they replace.
GFDL is a federal research laboratory in the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric
Research, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The laboratory performs comprehensive,
long-lead-time research that is fundamental to the mission of NOAA.
One of the goals of this research is to expand the scientific understanding of
the physical processes governing the behavior of the atmosphere and the oceans
as complex fluid systems. These systems can be modeled mathematically, and
their phenomenology can be studied by complex computer simulations. Using this
information can improve climate prediction and weather forecasting. GFDL is one
of the nation's foremost computer laboratories concentrating primarily on the
modeling of hurricanes and other large-scale weather phenomena.
In late September, NOAA awarded the Raytheon Company, of Garland, Texas, a
four-year, $34 million base contract to build the high-performance computing
system. The total value of the contract, inclusive of all options, is
approximately $67 million.
Financing for the project is being provided by SGI Solutions Finance, a
division of SGI. A key component in the winning strategy proposed by Raytheon
and SGI was a creative financial solution structured through SGI Solutions
Finance.
Ad Emmen [News on Advanced IT] [Calendar] [Analysis] [IT in Medicine] |
 |