AEROSPACE

Cray today announced that several meteorological research projects and a workshop will launch the new Earth System Research Center (ESRC), a cooperative venture between Cray and the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). The ESRC is being established to advance the science of earth-system modeling over the East-Asia Pacific region, as well as to promote collaboration within the Korean academic community and leverage the collective knowledge of academia, government and industry. Combining KMA's expertise in operational weather prediction and research with Cray's high-performance computing (HPC) acumen, the research center will contribute to KMA's mission of benefiting public welfare by improving weather and seasonal climate predictions. The ERSC will build on a Cray contract with KMA to provision Cray X1E supercomputers for the support of KMA's operational numerical weather prediction activities. The initial projects selected for the ESRC program are aimed at improving physical parameterizations for weather forecasting and computational science, including grid computing. A number of researchers from Yonsei University, Seoul National University, Pukyong National University and Pusan National University will conduct the work. The first ESRC workshop, focusing on efficiency and numerical accuracy in weather forecasting models, will take place October 28, 2005, in conjunction with the Korean Meteorological Society's autumn meeting in Seoul. Keynote speakers at the event will be Professor Steven Cocke of the Meteorological Department at Florida State University and John Levesque, Cray Senior Technologist and Program Director of the Cray Center of Excellence at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "KMA is pleased to partner with Cray as we seek to advance the science of meteorology on several fronts," said Dongil Lee, chief of the Supercomputer Center at KMA. "The computational studies we undertake now and in the future as part of the ESRC collaboration will significantly contribute to KMA's mission by helping us leverage our supercomputing resources, improving our forecasting capabilities in several important areas." "Cray sponsors research and development activity as part of our continuing efforts to push the leading edge of HPC in the earth sciences and other areas of advanced study," said Per Nyberg, Cray's Earth Sciences Business Manager. "The ESRC brings together KMA's world-class meteorological research and operational resources with Cray's supercomputing expertise. The resulting collaboration will benefit the citizens of Korea and people throughout the region."