NASA chooses SGI to power climate research

The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has selected SGI to further enhance its research and analysis capabilities in climate prediction.

The NCCS is home to the Discover supercomputer, which conducts weather and climate simulations that span time scales from seasons and years to decades and centuries. Data and visualisations from these simulations are then made available to researchers, laboratories, and universities around the world, fuelling climate science discovery at an accelerated pace.

As climate simulations use and produce a vast amount of data, the NCCS replaced legacy portions of Discover in order to reduce maintenance costs and meet its growing climate data needs.

Based on SGI’s proven ability to solve large-scale, data-intensive problems with industry-standard components while providing ease-of-use benefits, NCCS chose a 1.9 petaflops SGI Rackable® clusters featuring an Intel® Xeon® E5-2696 v3 processor, with a non-blocking Mellanox fat tree FDR interconnect. By procuring additional compute power through SGI, the NCCS will be able to analyse larger amounts of existing and new data as well as develop higher-resolution weather and climate simulations, improving the reliability of research findings. The new capabilities will also permit researchers to derive even more precise findings from regional-scale simulations based on global-scale climate modelling results.

“Earth’s climate is constantly evolving, and we have the opportunity to create and analyse data to tell us why and how. Thanks to high-performance computing technology available today, researchers are able to assert credible findings from climate simulations,” said Daniel Duffy, high-performance computing lead at the NCCS. “With SGI’s compute technology, we can analyse more data and run more global simulations at much higher resolutions, enabling significantly increased fidelity and insights for our researchers.”

The end-to-end Mellanox fat tree FDR fabric will allow the NCCS to fluidly connect its existing scalable units into the SGI Rackable Scalable Unit. With physical space constraints at the NCCS, SGI’s solution is ideal as it delivers a very dense system with fewer nodes and more cores at a lowered cost. Additionally, the SGI Rackable Clusters’ water-chilled server racks will ensure a highly efficient cooling solution while seamlessly integrating into the existing NCCS infrastructure.

“In just a couple years we have seen the science industry explode with data, enabling groundbreaking insights we couldn’t imagine beforehand. High-performance computing is a fundamental part of ensuring researchers have the tools to access all the data at their fingertips,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO of SGI. “At SGI, we are excited to extend our relationship with the NCCS, ensuring centres like theirs have the high-performance technology they need to continue to drive innovation.”