IBM Supercomputer to Assess Mankind's Impact on Earth's Climate.BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 11, 1999-- National Center for Atmospheric Research The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a non-governmental U.S.-based institute whose stated mission is "exploring and understanding our atmosphere and its interactions with the Sun, the oceans, the biosphere, and human society. selects RS/6000 SP See IBM SP. Note to Broadcast Editors -- B-roll is available Wednesday, August 11 from 15:30 EST EST electroshock therapy. EST abbr. electroshock therapy (3:30 PM EST) to 15:45 EST (3:45 PM EST) on Ku Band Telestar 4 Transponder K13 The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR NCAR National Center for Atmospheric Research (USA) NCAR North Carolina Association of Realtors NCAR National Conference on the Advancement of Research NCAR Navy Center for Acquisition Research NCAR NorCal Aussie Rescue ) took delivery today of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, an IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) RS/6000 SP system that will accelerate researchers' abilities to simulate global climate patterns and determine mankind's impact on them. The new RS/6000 SP system, code-named "blackforest," is five times larger and twenty times more powerful than the system made famous during Deep Blue's historic 1997 victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov Garry Kimovich Kasparov (IPA: [ˈgarʲə ˈkʲɪməvʲə̈ʨ kʌˈsparəf]; Russian: . It will give researchers at NCAR facilities in Boulder the computing power they need to evaluate the effects of industrial pollutants, including greenhouse gases and other airborne chemicals, on Earth's climate. Blackforest will also help NCAR's scientific divisions and university affiliates conduct atmospheric research Atmospheric Research (ISSN 0169-8095) is scientific journal dealing with the part of the atmosphere where meteorological events occur; intended for atmospheric scientists (such as meteorologists and climatologists), aerosol scientists, and hydrologists. into critical areas such as droughts, ozone depletion Ozone depletion describes two distinct, but related observations: a slow, steady decline of about 4 percent per decade in the total amount of ozone in Earth's stratosphere since around 1980; and a much larger, but seasonal, decrease in stratospheric ozone over Earth's polar regions , long-range weather prediction and global climate changes. Blackforest's computing cousin, another RS/6000 SP system, was installed last October at the National Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction The United States National Centers for Environmental Prediction delivers national and global weather, water, climate and space weather guidance, forecasts, warnings and analyses to its Partners and External User Communities. (NCEP NCEP National Cholesterol Education Program ) in Suitland, Maryland, and will eventually run all of the nation's operational weather forecasting weather forecasting Prediction of the weather through application of the principles of physics and meteorology. Weather forecasting predicts atmospheric phenomena and changes on the Earth's surface caused by atmospheric conditions (snow and ice cover, storm tides, floods, models. "With the installation of the RS/6000 SP system, we can now offer computing capacity comparable to that of any environmental center in the world," said Al Kellie, director of NCAR's computing division. "The SP's computing power will open the door for even greater scientific progress in global climate simulation and atmospheric research. It will allow NCAR to enter into the terascale computing arena within the next year." The Climate System Model is NCAR's flagship tool for studying the atmosphere. It can simulate global climate patterns of the past, present and future by tracking changes in temperature, moisture, circulation and cloud cover, along with atmospheric interactions with the ocean and other parts of Earth's system. The RS/6000 SP will provide NCAR with the high performance computing power it needs to support long-running simulations of Earth's climate system. "IBM provides advanced deep computing solutions that help scientists and researchers solve problems on a global scale," said Rod Adkins, general manager, IBM RS/6000. "The RS/6000 SP has played a crucial role in breakthroughs in nuclear simulation, weather forecasting, drug design and geological research. The SP system being delivered today to NCAR marks the next generation of computational power capabilities that will help answer the most complex problems of our time." The new RS/6000 SP system contains 160 dual processor nodes with 160 gigabytes of memory and 2.5 terabytes of disk space. It offers a peak speed of 204 gigaflops (GIGA FLoating point OPerations per Second) One billion floating point operations per second. See FLOPS. (unit) gigaflops - (GFLOPS) One thousand million (10^9) floating point operations per second. , more than doubling the peak capacity of NCAR's current computing center. NCAR joins several other environmental research centers that have recently acquired similar IBM RS/6000 SP systems. They include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville. . About NCAR NCAR provides computing support for over 100 atmospheric scientists who work at its Boulder laboratories as well as hundreds of other researchers at universities throughout North America. Its primary sponsor is the National Science Foundation (NSF NSF - National Science Foundation ). NCAR is managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) is a nonprofit corporation founded in 1960 by research institutions with doctoral programs in the atmospheric and related sciences. , a consortium of more than 60 universities (see attached list) offering Ph.Ds in atmospheric or related sciences. More information on NCAR is available at: http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/ About IBM RS/6000 More than 850,000 IBM RS/6000 systems have been shipped to over 125,000 commercial and technical customers around the world. The RS/6000 family of computers feature IBM RISC-based microprocessors and run AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) IBM's Unix-based operating system which runs on its Intellistation workstations and pSeries, p5, iSeries and i5 server families. , IBM's UNIX operating system Noun 1. UNIX operating system - trademark for a powerful operating system UNIX, UNIX system operating system, OS - (computer science) software that controls the execution of computer programs and may provide various services . RS/6000 products range in size and capacity from workstations, workgroup and enterprise servers, to the RS/6000 SP supercomputer. From businesses deploying advanced technologies to become more efficient and profitable, to governments and universities seeking to solve the grand challenge problems of our time, RS/6000 computers support a wide range of applications and provide the reliability, availability and price/performance that today's information technology managers demand. More information on the RS/6000 SP is available at: http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/hardware/largescale/index.html IBM, SP and RS/6000 are registered trademarks or trademarks of the IBM corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, products and service names, which may be denoted by a double asterisk (**) may be trademarks or service marks of others. UCAR members include: University of Alabama in Huntsville University of Alaska/Anchorage University at Albany, State University of New York University of Arizona/Tucson California Institute of Technology/Pasedena University of California, Davis University of California, Irvine University of California, Los Angeles University of Chicago Colorado State University/Fort Collins University of Colorado at Boulder Cornell University/Ithaca, NY University of Denver Drexel University/Philadelphia, Pa. Florida State University/Tallahassee Georgia Institute of Technology/Atlanta Harvard University/Boston University of Hawaii/Honolulu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of Iowa/Iowa City Iowa State University/Ames The Johns Hopkins University/Baltimore, Md. University of Maryland/College Park Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Boston McGill University/Montreal, Canada University of Miami University of Michigan-Ann Arbor University of Minnesota/Minneapolis-St.Paul University of Missouri/Columbia University of Nebraska, Lincoln University and Community College System of Nevada/Las Vegas University of New Hampshire, Durham New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology/Albuquerque New York University North Carolina State University/Raleigh The Ohio State University/Columbus University of Oklahoma/Tulsa Old Dominion University/Norfolk, Va. Pennsylvania State University/Harrisburg Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. Purdue University/Lafayette, Ind. Rice University/Houston, Tex. Saint Louis University Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD/San Diego Stanford University/Palo Alto Texas A & M University/College Station University of Texas at Austin Texas Tech University/Lubbock University of Toronto Utah State University/Logan University of Utah/Salt Lake City University of Virginia/Charlottesville University of Washington/Seattle Washington State University/Pullman University of Wisconsin- Madison University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Rhode Island University of Wyoming/Laramie Yale University/New Haven, Conn. York University/Toronto, Canada |
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