INDUSTRY

IBM today announced that the University of California at Irvine (UCI) has selected a powerful IBM supercomputer that will enable researchers to model and predict changes to the Earth's surface, atmosphere and oceans up to 300 years into the future. The powerful new supercomputer, dubbed the Earth System Modeling Facility (ESMF), will be used by researchers at UC Irvine's Department of Earth System Science (ESS) to simulate climate changes and gain answers to critical questions such as how global warming, man-made pollutants, polar-ice movements, and chemical cycles will impact the Earth and its inhabitants over the next few centuries. “Earth's weather and climate result from an intricate and complex interplay of physical, chemical and biological processes of the atmosphere, oceans, and land surface; they are crucial components of the global environment that supports life on Earth,” said Charles Zender, assistant professor of Earth system science at UCI. “The ESMF IBM Supercomputer is designed to provide sustained compute capability, speed and storage capacity necessary to best meet the challenges involved in understanding the atmosphere and its interactions with the Earth system, as well as developing methods for predicting its behavior. The ESMF will also allow researchers to pursue data-intensive research utilizing the large geophysical datasets from current and next generation numerical models and satellite observations.” “This supercomputer will give UC Irvine the speed and performance they need to push Earth system research to a new level - these researchers and scientists are pursuing very important research across a broad spectrum of environmental conditions that affect us all,” said Dave Turek, vice president, Deep Computing, IBM. “The IBM supercomputer, made up of IBM eServer pSeries systems with POWER microprocessors, provide the complex computational capabilities needed to help UCI researchers produce realistic simulations and analyses as the study of long term effects of global warming becomes more critical.” The ESMF supercomputer is one the most powerful computing systems at the University of California, capable of calculating 528 gigaFLOPS (a billion floating-point operations per second). The supercomputer consists of seven IBM eServer p655 systems, each with eight POWER4+™ microprocessors, all connected together with IBM's clustering technology, and one IBM eServer p690, with thirty-two POWER4+ microprocessors, running AIX®, IBM's UNIX® operating system. Having been termed the first “server on a chip,” IBM continues to invest in the POWER architecture to offer customers open, innovative technology solutions through the AIX, OS/400 or Linux operating systems that complement the growing demand for 64-bit applications. IBM's family of POWER microprocessors are among the most widely used in the industry. In addition to being the force behind IBM’s pSeries, iSeries and BladeCenter JS20 servers, the microprocessor technology can be found in Nintendo game consoles, Apple computers, and some of the world's most powerful supercomputers and storage systems. The ESMF storage solution is based on dual, IBM xSeries 335 servers leveraging Red Hat Linux and Sistina Global File System (GFS). Disk storage consists of 32 terabytes of RAID5. This low-cost, single-namespace file system is modular, robust and scaleable yet provides adequate read-write bandwidth for gigabyte data-file sizes. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of California, the ESMF will power a wide spectrum of Earth-system modeling (ESM) projects conducted by Earth system science professors, researchers, students and collaborators. The Facility is devoted to the fundamental understanding of the coupled physical climate, chemistry, and biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system associated with global change. The knowledge gained at UC Irvine feeds into national climate modeling efforts.