ENGINEERING

NASA Center for Climate Simulation Expands Research Capabilities with Dell

Written by: Writer
Category: ENGINEERING
  • NCCS to double its computational capabilities to more than 300 trillion calculations per second
  • New Dell servers will enable NCCS users to fine-tune model resolutions and increase data analysis capacity for NASA’s earth and space science user community

Dell is providing the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), located at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with new Dell PowerEdge C6100 servers customized for high-performance computing (HPC) environments. The contract is worth up to $5.1 million dollars. With the new servers, NCCS users at Goddard and locations across the U.S. will conduct simulation modeling and data analysis to explore, understand and predict climate change.

“When we debuted the NASA Center for Climate Simulation this spring, we anticipated expanding our high-performance computing capabilities to meet the growing needs of NASA’s earth and space science user community. We chose to use Dell’s PowerEdge servers based upon both the commitment of Dell to the HPC community and the ability of their systems to scale with our program over time,” said Phil Webster, Chief, Goddard's Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office.

NASA researchers will benefit from significant improvements in the Dell PowerEdge C6100’s system performance and reductions in energy consumption over previous generation servers — with anticipated improvements of 69 percent in performance and 47 percent in energy efficiency. The new servers will double NCCS computational capabilities to more than 300 trillion calculations per second. This increased performance will enable NCCS users to fine-tune global model resolutions to capture smaller-scale features in the atmosphere and oceans.

Launched this spring, the Dell PowerEdge C6100 is proving popular with universities and public and private sector research organizations committed to increasing HPC efficiency with open, affordable technologies. Its unique density and shared infrastructure enables organizations like NCCS to allocate systems management, space and time savings toward further innovation. Simplified systems installation also means customers can take advantage of the latest processors and emerging technologies more quickly.

“We are proud of our work with NASA over the years and are excited to work with their expansion of NCCS. Its work plays a major part in advancing the scientific community’s understanding of climate change. NASA climate simulations use and produce vast amounts of data, which creates a demanding technology environment for HPC solutions. NCCS and many other leading government, academic and scientific institutions around the world need affordable, capable HPC platforms. Dell delivers purpose-designed HPC solutions but builds them on standardized, scalable technology that is easier to manage, maintain and upgrade,” said Max Peterson, Vice President, Dell Federal.