NASA Upgrades Weather Research Supercomputer

Cowards Anonymous writes "NASA's Center for Computational Sciences is nearly tripling the performance of a supercomputer it uses to simulate Earth's climate and weather, and our planet's relationship with the Sun. NASA is deploying a 67-teraflop machine that takes advantage of IBM's iDataPlex servers, new rack-mount products originally developed to serve heavily trafficked social networking sites."

Comments

Big Question:

[Penguinisto]

...what are they doing to improve the algorithms used to calculate the results? And if they're transparent (e.g. open for public inspection) - bonus!

(yes, I know that there are only a few folks in the Human race that would even know how to read the things. That said, it would be nice to have something educational, and at the same time open for public scrutiny so as to avoid political accusation, you know?)

/P

Re:Big Question:

[bunratty]

As you may expect, making climate models more accurate is a big topic of climate research these days. You can read about the basics of climate models at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_climate_model

Re:Big Question:

[toby34a]

You know, a lot of the climate and weather prediction models are open source. You can download the source code if you want, and run it on your own PC if you have certain compilers. Some links for you for your own perusal: Community Climate Model NASA GISS Model Weather Research and Forecasting Model Regional Atmospheric Modeling System As long as you have access to a Linux/Unix machine, you can get these models yourself. If you want to contribute, you can do so. Just know that you probably need to have taken graduate level courses in numerical methods and actually get the physical terms in the model to make changes that mean something. Science in this case is rather open. People can easily download these models and make changes to improve it if they needed to (or to test sensitivity, etc).

Re:Big Question:

[Leebert]

Lots of the models are open. There's a nice site at: http://modelingguru.nasa.gov/

Well how long?

[the eric conspiracy]

Does this mean that the forecasting simulation for tomorrow's weather will run in less than 24 hours?

GPGPU

[sdemjanenko]

Seeing as 67 teraflops is going to be the new processing power for this machine, I wonder if a NVIDIA CUDA implementation has been considered. Their Tesla systems are designed for this High Performance Computing, offer a significant amount of processing power and are relatively easy to parallelize code for. I know that oil companies use these high powered systems to find locations of oil, but I guess that its less likely for weather forcasting since there is less money in it. However, it would be interesting to see these cards used for modelling hurricanes and determine their expected strength and path of travel more accurately.

Open models are imperative

[EmbeddedJanitor]

These are the models predicting Global Warming etc. These need to be open to peer review due to the significant impact of getting these models wrong.

Faster does not mean better. I'd rather have less iterations per day on a good model than many of a crap model.

Re:Open models are imperative

[pablodiazgutierrez]

I'd rather have less iterations per day on a good model than many of a crap model.

Well, as long as the simulation doesn't go slower than the weather itself. Sounds silly, but it's a relevant point.

Re:Other Big Question: Is this NASA's job?

[khallow]

From the National Aeronautics and Space Act (which authorizes NASA and its activities):

(d) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:

(1)The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;

(4)The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes;

(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;

It doesn't count the same way.

[Junta]

When an xhpl score says '67 teraflops' and nVidia/AMD gpus spout off about the ludicrous number of gigaflops they have, it simply isn't the same.

For example, the PS3 variant of the Cell processor claims 410 gigaflops. It's hpl score, however, would be about 6-9 gigaflops. Even the new cell processors 'only' get 200 gigaflops by xhpl count.

32-bit precision scores aren't comparable directoly to 64-bit operations.

Eeek

[Zashi]

iDataPlex? Really? I am a tester at IBM. We've just started to qualify various hard drives and IO cards for the iDataPlex systems. They're very oddly designed and in general suck. The firmware (BIOS/uEFI) is really crappy but it usually is at this stage of testing. I'm sure it will get better over time. The thing that most likely will not get better is the horrible, horrible physical design (which was specially request by Facebook). I would say the reason is unknown, but from what I've heard it's because Facebook didn't want to upgrade their racks/rails so they had IBM design servers to fit them.

There's lots of curious and pointless design features. They're almost like big-ass blades, designed to slide out of a larger outer-housing that contains the PSU and fans, but several cables and wires connect the machine to the outer-housing making it impossible to remove without also removing the outer-housing from the rack. In one variant, the pci-slot is literally in the middle of the system (imagine a card slot in the middle of your motherboard, that, when a card is inserted into it, acts as a locking bar).

All the ports are in the front of the system: vga, usb, ethernet. Except for power. Power is in the back, attached to the external shell. There are also ps/2 ports (a rarity among newer servers) but they are completely blocked by the faceplate.

My overall reaction: meh.