Research Team sets US WRF Records

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WRFA team consisting of researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and IBM’s Watson Research Center have set a US record for size, performance and fidelity of computer weather simulations using the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model. The researchers set a performance record of 8.8 teraflops running on 12,090 processors from the newly installed Cray XT4 named “Franklin” at LBNL. They also set a record for “parallelism” running on 15,360 processors from the IBM BlueGene/L at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The scientific challenge we’re addressing is the question in numerical weather prediction of how to take advantage of coming petascale computing power,” said weather scientist Josh Hacker of NCAR. “There are surprisingly complex questions about how to harness the higher resolution offered by petascale systems to best improve the final quality of weather predictions.”

Congratulations to John Michalakes, Josh Hacker, Rich Loft, Michael McCracken, Allan Snavely, Nick Wright, Tom Spelce, Brent Gorda and Robert Walkup!

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