As scientists meet to consider the 2005 AMS theme of "Building the Earth Information System" and the role that science can play in decision-making for society, Silicon Graphics today announced its continued commitment to providing an unprecedented blend of high-performance computing, visualization and storage solutions that consistently drive global innovations in meteorology and climatology, including research and forecasting. SGI delivers innovative technology to researchers and scientists employed in the study of such phenomena as climate change, tsunami, ozone depletion, environmental impacts in urban planning, groundwater pollution, and the improvement of severe event and climate forecasting. Beyond weather prediction modeling, SGI solutions support satellite and radar image processing and data management solutions for the terabytes of data managed in this industry, plus air and water quality modeling. SGI Activities at AMS The SGI Mobile Innovation Center (MIC), a state-of-the-art customized 18-wheel truck equipped with SGI's latest technology solutions will be featured at AMS. Equipped with the compute and storage capacity required to process and analyze data equivalent to a 100 years of worldwide climate data, this rolling corporate briefing center and demonstration facility also features a 20 seat SGI Reality Center immersive visualization facility onboard. On Sunday, SGI co-sponsored AMS Weatherfest, an annual education and community outreach event to introduce university and under-graduate students and parents to the amazing world of meteorology and weather; the Mobile Innovation Center was open to the public. Monday through Wednesday, the Center will also serve as a conference room featuring presentations and demonstrations from many important innovators in meteorology who rely on SGI high-performance computing for their research; the MIC is open house all day Thursday. On Monday, the MIC will host an invitation-only luncheon for the World Meteorological Organization; Dr. Tsengdar Lee, Information Systems Specialist, NASA Headquarters, Science Mission Directorate, will speak about the development of next generation weather and climate modeling technologies on NASA's Columbia supercomputer. On Tuesday, Dr. Bob Atlas, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center will also discuss NASA's Columbia at a VIP luncheon. NASA's Columbia is the result of a 15-week effort with SGI, NASA and Intel to build and successfully install one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The 10,240-processor Columbia supercomputer is fully deployed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The Columbia supercomputer, built from 20 SGI Altix systems, each powered by 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors, promises to revolutionize the rate of scientific discovery at NASA. For instance, on NASA's previous supercomputers, simulations showing five years worth of changes in ocean temperatures and sea levels were taking a year to model. But using a single SGI Altix system, scientists can simulate decades of ocean circulation in just days, while producing simulations in greater detail than ever before. The history-making supercomputer also incorporates an SGI(R) InfiniteStorage solution that gives NASA access to 440 terabytes of data, an amount 44 times larger than the entire U.S. Library of Congress print collection. SGI Featured Speakers at AMS Featured speakers and topics open to all AMS attendees include: -- Dr. David Barkai, HPC Computational Architect, Intel Technologies for Numerical Weather Simulations -- Dr. Eric Frost, Geological Sciences, Co-Director, SDSU Visualization Center Collaborative interaction with real time data sets; Using sensor networks and high end visualization for decision support. -- Dr. Gerardo Cisneros, Scientist, SGI "High-Performance Computing at SGI and the Status of Climate and Weather Codes on SGI Altix" -- Dr. David P. Bacon and Dr. Ananthakrishna SarmaCenter for Atmospheric Physics, SAIC Application of Unstructured Adaptive Grids to Numerical Weather Prediction -- Dr. Greg Wilson, President, Baron Advanced Meteorological Systems and Dr. John McHenry, Chief Scientist, Baron Advanced Meteorological Systems High Performance Real Time Environmental Forecasts -- Dr. Fred Lewis, IPS MeteoStar and Dr. Dennis Moon, WindLogic Applications for high resolution weather forecast modeling SGI Powers Meteorological Research and Forecasting There are over 100 sites worldwide that specialize in major meteorological research and forecasting. SGI has a presence in more than 50% of them. SGI systems are present in most of the leading North American and European weather institutions and in a significant share of all forecasting centers. Add to this our worldwide presence in a large number of environmental research institutions and the value of SGI systems to this industry is clear. SGI offers one of the industry's fastest platforms for MM5, the widely used numerical weather prediction model from Pennsylvania State University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). SGI technology also powers one of the fastest platforms for the WRF (Weather Research and Forecast) Modeling System, a numerical forecast system being developed and managed by the Department of Commerce (NOAA), the Department of Defense (Air Force and Navy), the Department of Transportation (FAA), and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR/NCAR). "SGI HPC systems for meteorology and weather forecasting are literally all around the world, assisting scientists to analyze, understand and predict weather and climate variability and changes," noted Dr. Ilene Carpenter, business development manager for weather and climate, SGI. SGI technology powers IMGW (a weather forecasting center) in Poland, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the Brazilian Navy as well as the National Institute of Meteorology in Brazil, the Canadian Meteorological Center, the Bureau of Meteorology in Beijing, the Bureau of Meteorology in Shanghai, and the Center for Mathematical Modeling and Computer Simulation in India. "Since the introduction of Altix 64-bit Linux OS-based systems, SGI has seen a burst of sales activity to universities for meteorology studies," continued Dr. Carpenter, "including the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, University of Florida, and University of Hawaii. The two most recent installations of SGI Altix systems, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in October and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in July of 2004, for leading edge climate research and pollution studies, drives home exactly how unique SGI is in our commitment to deliver the compute, visualization and storage capabilities to advance atmospheric and related sciences." SGI Powers Earthquake Research and Disaster Prevention SGI will also feature a 2002 dataset from Los Alamos National Labs visualizing the result if a large meteor were to strike the ocean in a tsunami animation, using the SAGE hydrocode, jointly developed by Los Alamos and SAIC. SGI technology also enables leading research institutions worldwide involved in earthquake research and disaster prevention, including: The Jet Propulsion Lab at University of California leads the QuakeSim project, which runs simulations of earthquakes, including those that cause tsunamis. JPL uses variety of platforms for simulation but the biggest by far is an SGI 512-processor Altix system. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, previously invested in SGI Altix 3000 supercomputing technology powered by the latest 208 Intel Itanium 2 processors as part of an initiative to increase Australia's research abilities in earth sciences and earthquake phenomena. The first purchase and delivery of an SGI Altix system worldwide and the first full-scale high-end Linux OS-based parallel processing system in Japan was sold to the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute (ERI). ERI received a 108-processor SGI Altix system to be used as a shared supercomputing resource for ERI researchers conducting advanced earthquake and volcano studies, including research on ways to minimize earthquake and volcano damage. The Arctic Region Supercomputer Center (ARSC) uses a three-dimensional immersive environment, a MD Flex system, powered by an SGI Onyx system powered by four CPUs, four gigabytes of memory, and two SGI InfiniteReality4 graphics pipes. The room housing the system is called the ARSC Discovery Lab, where three walls and the floor are equipped to display stereoscopic images, which allows researchers to virtually immerse themselves in their data set. A 384-CPU SGI Origin server system was installed in 2002 at Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED). NIED conducts earth sciences research and development as applied to disaster tracking and prediction, a field that relies heavily on large-scale simulations. Since 1991, NIED has been a pioneer in the use of data simulations to create global ocean circulation models, crust structure analyses and earthquake wave transfers, along with related simulations involving massive calculations.