Yellowstone Super First to Crunch Local Climate Models

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To be deployed this summer in Cheyenne, Wyoming, NCAR’s new Petascasle Yellowstone supercomputer will be the first system capable of local climate modeling.

It’s a big deal,” said climate scientist Linda Mearns of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Yellowstone will help researchers calculate climate change on a regional, rather than continental, scale. With a better grasp of how warming may affect local water resources, endangered species and extreme winds, local and state governments will be able to plan more effectively.

Yellowstone will be an IBM iDataPlex supercomputer system, consisting of 4,662 nodes, each with two Intel Sandy Bridge EP processors, for a total of 74,592 processor cores and 149.2 terabytes of memory. Nodes will be connected using a Mellanox FDR InfiniBand full fat tree. Nodes will run Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 6. The central file and data storage resource, called LADE, will consist of file system servers and storage devices that will be linked to the supercomputer systems and eventually provide 16.42 petabytes of usable disk space. Read the Full Story.