NCAR Takes Delivery of 76 Teraflops Power 575 Hydro Cluster

Published: May 15, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, the major weather center for the United States that also does a lot of climate modeling, this week announced that it has taken delivery of a 76 teraflops cluster of IBM's new Power 575 machines, more than tripling the capacity of the AIX-based super currently installed at NCAR.

Perhaps that means weather forecasting will be more accurate, then? (Didn't your momma tell you it isn't polite to laugh?)

The Water-Cooled Power 575 Hydro Cluster Node

Anyway, the new NCAR box, dubbed Bluefire, is actually the second phase of a project called the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation, and is undergoing acceptance testing. Provided the Power 575 "Hydro Cluster" passes muster, it will be operational in August. IBM refers to the Power 575 as the Hydro Cluster because it is cooled by water rather than air. The Power 575 server crams 16 dual-core Power6 processors running at 4.7 GHz into a 2U form factor, a feat of density that is only possible thanks to water blocks on the key components in the system and water jackets on the rear doors, both of which plug directly into data center CRAC units, which dump the heat outside of the data center.

The Bluefire machine is actually replacing three different computers in use by NCAR, which have an aggregate of 20 teraflops of computing. The new cluster has a total of 4,096 processor cores, 12 terabytes of main memory, and 150 terabytes of disk capacity housed in IBM's DS4800 disk arrays. NCAR says that the Bluefire machine is three times as energy efficient as the AIX gear it is replacing. The largest of the machines that NCAR has is a cluster comprised of System p5 575 servers with 1,696 cores and rated at a peak 12.9 teraflops of power, dubbed Blueice.

So some say the world will end with Blueice, some with Bluefire. NCAR will now be able to run the simulations to see who was correct. (No apologies to Robert Frost, whose "Fire and Ice" clearly inspired the naming at NCAR as far as I am concerned. Look it up, it is a good poem; it actually has both rhyme and reason. Don't expect me to violate Frost's copyrights by pasting it here.)

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