Today Aspen Systems announced that NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD has increased the computational power to their primary computing platform the Discover supercomputer by over an incredible 30%. The project Scalable Unit 15 (SCU15) was awarded to, built by and installed by Aspen Systems, Inc., in order to add a 25,600-core scalable compute unit onto the system for increased data analysis on our climate through visualized data modeling.
With the successful integration of the newest scalable compute unit, our users now have the largest computational partition ever installed within the Discover cluster,” said Dr. Dan Duffy, Chief of Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office at NASA Goddard. “This capability is now enabling research on extremely high resolution global atmospheric circulation models with updated physics to better understand deep convective systems that can spawn extreme weather events. The outcome of these studies will result in higher quality weather forecasting capabilities and a better understanding of new observables that are needed on future remote sensing platforms.”
This latest addition brings Discover to over 129,000 cores and a peak speed of nearly 6.8 petaflops by employing 1st Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and 100 gigabit-per-second Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) interconnects. This newest compute unit better serves NASA’s demanding weather and climate model workloads. Applications include near-real-time, high-resolution global weather forecasts capturing extreme events.
System highlights:
- Manufacturer: Aspen Systems, Inc.
- Peak performance: 1,920 Tflop/s
- Cores: 25,600 Intel Xeon Skylake processor cores
- Nodes: 640 Supermicro TwinPro nodes, (2) 20-core processors per node
- Memory: 192 GB of memory per node
- No Swap Space
- Processors: 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Skylake
- Interconnect: Intel OmniPath Architecture
- Cooling: 10 Motivair ChilledDoor
- Installation: Q3 2019
Aspen Systems is honored to be trusted by such a prestigious organization as NASA to build, install and support their latest addition to SCU,” said Steve Spring, Chief Executive Officer of Aspen Systems. “The crucial work in climate science that NCCS is doing will save lives,” he said regarding the system’s primary application. “We have a world class team here, and we are all proud of what we have accomplished.”
