SCIENCE

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) doing advanced modeling with the Climate Modeling and Research System (CMRS), will now be able to use the widely-respected numerical routines of the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) Library on the new Cray XT6 supercomputer, known as Gaea.

The CMRS will provide a dedicated high performance computing resource for NOAA and its research partners, and allow scientists to leverage a significant increase in computing capacity to address some of the most pressing global climate change questions. The Cray supercomputer, named Gaea (Mother Earth, from Greek mythology), will be the world's most powerful high performance computing system dedicated to climate research.

Rob Meyer, CEO of NAG, says, "NAG is proud to be a part of the NOAA system and looks forward to adding these advanced climate researchers to the ever growing set of prestigious NAG users worldwide dedicated to solving many of the most important challenges of our time. At NAG we feel strongly that a part of our mission is to play a role in encouraging excellent science."

NAG routines already help to power the work of other climate and weather research teams across the globe; including those at the UK Ocean Observing and Climate Research Group in Southampton, at the German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, at the Italian Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and at the India National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.

Further, in other HPC fields, NAG provides the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) support service for the UK National Supercomputing Service (HECToR: High-End Computing Terascale Resource). HECToR includes the world's first production Cray XT6 system.

NAG's technical experts advise parallel computing centres around the globe, that operate many different CPU and GPU based HPC platforms.