In the spirit of Earth Day (April 22nd), we are very excited about the role that high performance computing has to play in advancing climate change research and technologies, and have dedicated this newsletter to showcasing important work being done in this area. We are also proud to be partnering with a number of leading international centers that are pushing the boundaries of system scale, providing leadership computing capabilities to climate researchers.
Enjoy this issue of our newsletter. And Happy Earth Day! |
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Climate Research Pushes Boundaries of HPC by Per Nyberg |
Per Nyberg, Cray's director of earth sciences marketing, will address the subject of HPC and climatology at the WCRP/WWRP/WMO World Modelling Summit for Climate Prediction in Reading, UK in May.
As early adopters of HPC, scientists studying the weather, climate and oceans pushed supercomputers to their limits with the computational demands of numerical modeling. System requirements for sustained performance grew exponentially as the science evolved and numerical models were developed with more accurate representations of physical phenomena. What has remained constant is the need for better simulation accuracy to continue advancing scientific research. The practical and socio-economic impacts of weather, climate and ocean prediction on the world's population and economy drives investment in and use of high performance computing in the earth sciences. Any improvement in simulation accuracy and execution time is a vital component in disaster mitigation, including the safeguarding of human life and property, and in realizing economic opportunities. With increasing observational capabilities, modeling complexity and inter-disciplinary collaboration, the earth sciences community will continue to be a leading driver in the push towards higher productivity computing and the practical realization of a sustained petaflop.
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| 2008 INCITE Climate Research Awards Favor Cray |
 Last January the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science announced the recipients of the 2008 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact of Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program awards. Now in its fifth year, the INCITE program awarded 265 million hours, the largest number of supercomputing resource hours donated in their history. Hours were donated to 55 "computationally intensive, large-scale research projects." Research that would previously have taken years or decades to complete, can now be conducted in a fraction of that time.
In the category of climate research alone, over 75 percent of the climate research hours will be done on Cray supercomputers. Overall, more than 60 percent of all the research projects in the INCITE awards will be performed on Cray supercomputers. |
| Cray Joins European Center to Advance Automotive Technology |
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It was recently announced that the Cray subsidiary Cray Computer Deutschland GmbH has joined the Automotive Simulation Center Stuttgart (ASCS), a groundbreaking and innovative public-private partnership aimed at advancing the automobile industry through high-performance computing (HPC). Composed of software designers, scientists, researchers and top automobile manufacturers, ASCS will combine the expertise of key scientists and industry representatives with leading-edge supercomputing technologies to conduct research aimed at developing quiet, low pollution vehicles; creating products for the market that reduce fuel consumption, lower CO2 emissions and enhance safety; increasing cost efficiency and speeding time to market with new products.
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| Collaborative Forecasting of Severe Storms |
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| Cray Used to Study Metal Fuels |
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 Using a Cray X1E™ supercomputer, research on iron and aluminum nanoparticles at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) computing leadership facility, the National Center for Computational Sciences, "simulated a process that in the real world lasts five trillionths of a second." Unlike hydrocarbon fuels, ORNL-engineered metallic nano-fuels emit no pollutants.
Read more |
| Clean Coal Research |
 Using high performance computers at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), DOE researchers simulate coal gasification processes to help industry develop near-zero-emission coal plants to generate electricity and hydrogen and sequester carbon dioxide.
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| SC08 - Call for Papers |
Abstracts due 4/4
Papers and other proposals due 4/7
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| Editor's Message |
We welcome your feedback regarding our newsletter. Please email any comments to newsletter@cray.com. | |
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