NWSC Construction

University Corporation For Atmospheric Res, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

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.