International Pacific Research Center in Hawaii acuires Cray SV1 for climate research

 Mountain View 22 Sep 99 The International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) at the University of Hawaii. IPRC, the world's only climate research center specifically focused on the Asia-Pacific region, will use a new Cray SV1 vector supercomputer to accelerate basic research on regional climate change. Jointly funded by the United States and Japan, IPRC will use this boost in computing power to increase the resolution and size of its coupled ocean-atmospheric models. Specifically, IPRC scientists will be able to incorporate ocean temperature, current and salinity data from grid points just 50 kilometers apart into complex models that help them understand the effects of global warming, how the Pacific Ocean transports heat and the predictability of the Asian-Australian monsoon system.

"Our goal is to help scientists study climate variability over many years or decades," said Dr. Julian McCreary, director, IPRC. "We chose SGI's Cray system to boost our computing power because it was the best-performing machine available to us. Not only did it outperform other vendors on all three benchmarks, but it also runs our existing models very easily, eliminating the tedious task of rewriting code."

The real-world ocean codes used in IPRC's benchmarking include the Princeton Ocean Model (POM), the Los Alamos Parallel Ocean Program (POP) model and the Thermodynamic Ocean Modeling System (TOMS).

"Forecasting is not our focus. Instead, we conduct the basic research necessary to improve the prediction of climate changes, such as El NiŅo," said McCreary. "An example of our research interest is to understand why the Asia-Pacific monsoon region experiences heavy rain in one particular year and not the next. Our research, which we make publicly available, will be used by other scientists to help predict climate change."

With 16 gigabytes of RAM, the 24-processor Cray SV1 system will offer IPRC researchers access to a parallel vector architecture in addition to the distributed shared-memory platform found in IPRC's existing 32- and 16-processor Origin 2000 systems.

 

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