Message from SCD Director Al Kellie
Another year of great challenge and change for the Scientific Computing Division has run its course. During FY2001, SCD has managed significant and lasting achievements, which I am pleased to recognize in this Annual Scientific Report. Given the nature of our efforts in providing high performance computing support for NCAR and the atmospheric sciences community around the world, technological change is an inevitable feature of our planning and operational landscape. We may not always relish the upheavals that accompany such changes, but we always seek out and embrace the associated opportunities to support and advance the research agenda of NCAR's constituent research community.
Looking forward to the future:
A new generation of computing at NCAR
Student visitors to NCAR viewing blackforest, the Advanced Research Computing System housed in SCD's spotless computer room. -- Photo by Lynda Lester, SCD
This was a watershed year for SCD in terms of providing services to researchers, computational cycles, research and development progress, state-of-the-art enabling technologies, and irreplaceable research data.
During FY2001, SCD has:
Managed a successful procurement for an Advanced Research Computing System (ARCS) that has doubled NCAR's overall computing capabilities and will, over the course of the next several years, provide a sustained Teraflop of computing power for the atmospheric and related sciences.
Provided leadership in computational science research and development in important areas such as developing a terascale spectral element dynamical core for General Atmospheric Circulation models that has achieved a new high integration rate of 465 GFLOPS, and working toward a high-performance software framework for interoperable applications in Earth System Modeling.
Advanced the state of the art for NCAR's information services for data archiving.
Fostered a new architecture for terascale data access, analysis, and visualization technologies, and deployed a major new Scientific Visualization Laboratory which incorporates the NCAR AccessGrid node.
Assisted and supported NCAR's research community in converting their numerical simulations to run efficiently on the new generation of supercomputing architectures.
Led development of the Web100 project (along with PSC and NCSA) to fix some well-known problems in operating systems that currently inhibit effective utilization of national high-performance networks such as vBNS and Abilene.
Upgraded the networking, power, and environmental infrastructure that enables the computing center to support ever-expanding research in the atmospheric and related sciences.
In addition, SCD successfully participated in an intensive NSF review of our past five years' accomplishments. NSF's review panel found that SCD is not only highly supportive of NCAR, but that SCD is crucial to the overall mission of NCAR and the advancement of atmospheric science research. SCD staff are justifiably proud of these findings and the accomplishments underlying them. I urge you to read the details of our progress in this year's Annual Scientific Report.
And as you read through our report of FY2001 activities and accomplishments, I hope you will take away some sense of our excitement at the possibilities that lie before us. We are indeed embarking upon a new, bold, and challenging future, fueled by enhanced capabilities in computing, research, data storage, networking, analysis, and visualization.
We look forward to this future as we reflect on our past accomplishments. As always, we seek to provide the finest in computing resources, teamed with a dedicated and talented staff, to help advance the understanding of our complex climate system.