INDUSTRY

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. announced that the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service has selected the new Cray XD1 supercomputer to help improve the Forest Service's ability to predict and track the paths of smoke plumes from wildfires. Financial details were not disclosed. "Tracking a smoke plume as it moves downwind from a fire requires all the computational complexity of a weather model run over a nationwide domain. Tracking the evolving chemical composition of said plume produces a task so computationally intense that we assumed we would not be able to afford any computer capable of performing it," said Bryce Nordgren, a Physical Scientist with the Forest Service's Fire Science Lab. "Reviewing the test case results from Cray restored our hope that we would be able to perform a scientifically meaningful simulation on our budget." The Cray XD1 supercomputer excelled at running the test case on the software application the Forest Service will use for wildfire smoke plume trajectory prediction. The WRF-chem application couples weather prediction -- wind speed and direction, precipitation, temperature and humidity -- with the ability to do chemical analysis and dispersion prediction of smoke plumes in the atmosphere. "We were particularly impressed with the Cray XD1's awesome scalability on this challenging interdisciplinary problem. For example, the Linux scheduler synchronizes the execution of tasks across the processors to the microsecond. Cray was the only vendor to offer that kind of customization," Bryce said. The Cray XD1 supercomputer is scheduled to be installed this month at the Forest Service's Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. "The Forest Service's selection of the Cray XD1 supercomputer is another demonstration of the extra value that Cray can bring to customers pursuing critical research in the weather and chemistry markets. It is becoming clear that many of the most demanding science and engineering problems need more than what a standard commodity cluster can offer," said Peter Ungaro, vice president of marketing and sales at Cray. "The technologies engineered into the XD1 are enabling scientists and engineers to have access to supercomputing technologies that were once only limited to a small number of the largest institutions in the world. We are looking forward to our new partnership with the USDA Forest Service and welcome them to the Cray family." With U.S. list prices starting under $100,000, the Cray XD1 supercomputer combines AMD's Opteron processors and HyperTransport(TM) technology with an advanced Cray interconnect to provide industry leading performance and value. Designed for superior sustained application performance, the Cray XD1 system uses the direct connected processor architecture to directly link processors to each other and memory, eliminating interconnect bottlenecks and providing 30 times greater bandwidth and 30 times lower latency than typical cluster systems available today. HPC users can also take advantage of the Cray XD1 system's sophisticated management, self-monitoring and self-healing features to simplify system administration and ensure high availability. Other Cray XD1 innovations include applications acceleration capability based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) linked directly to processors over the Cray XD1 interconnect. Background: The Fire Sciences Laboratory, an arm of the Rocky Mountain Research Station located in Missoula, MT, is home to the Fire Behavior Project, Fire Chemistry Project, and the Fire Effects Project. The staff of these projects performs a variety of research on fire-related issues and topics. For more information, go to http://www.firelab.org/.