SCD Director's message

Al Kellie Fiscal Year 2003 was filled with new challenges in high performance computing, data storage, data analysis, and in providing support facilities and services to NCAR's large community of scientists.

Yet, in the face of these challenges, new opportunities have arisen as we work to maintain a world-class supercomputing facility for our users.

SCD continues to offer a complete set of integrated support services for researchers in the atmospheric, oceanic, and related sciences. SCD's computing resources and facilities support researchers around the world as well as at consortium member universities and at NCAR and UCAR. Scientific progress along broad fronts is enabled by SCD's support for the development and execution of large, long-running numerical simulations and the archiving, manipulation, and analysis of extremely large datasets.

Two major accomplishments stand out from all those described in this report: the rapid integration of a large new supercomputer into the NCAR computing facility and the release of a portal that speeds users' ability to locate, access, and manage research data.

IBM Cluster 1600 system bluesky

As part of the expansion of NCAR's Advanced Research Computing System (ARCS), a completely new supercomputer was added to the SCD computational environment in early FY2003. Bluesky, an IBM Cluster 1600 system, has a total of 1,216 POWER4 processors and a peak computational rate of 6.32 teraflops.

Late in FY2003, bluesky was augmented by twelve 32-way p690 SMP frames adding an additional 384 POWER4 processors and raising the total peak computational rate of the system to 8.23 teraflops. The augmentation also increased bluesky's total disk capacity to 31 TB. Bluesky now has 50 POWER4 p690 SMP frames, making it the single largest system of this type in the world.

The addition of the bluesky system in FY2003 immediately doubled both the Community and Climate Simulation Laboratory computing resources. And as an indication of the system's power and capability, SCD has allocated the 12 additional bluesky frames to increase the resource capacity available to the NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM), specifically for simulations to be submitted to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) activity later in 2004.

It was a tribute to the cooperation throughout the division that allowed such a fast, smooth commissioning: OIS provided infrastructure and logistics, HPS worked on system configuration and problem resolution, NETS established network connections, and USS prepared the system for production users.

Community Data Portal

Building on user requests, and working within NSF's Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Strategic Initiative, SCD released a newly designed Community Data Portal (CDP) for our users. This web-based site provides users with powerful search and browse capabilities across many of the most valuable research datasets. VETS also has published metadata for hundreds of datasets from across our organization, further enhancing the utility of the CDP for our users. This new facility has had an immediate, positive impact on NCAR's scientific research community, allowing them to locate valuable research data and to quickly incorporate that data into their research projects.

Other areas of significant advancement

Seeking to discern the important issues that face our users as they pursue their research, we convened a series of User Forums in April 2003. Both NCAR (local) and university (remote) users were asked to provide us with their perspectives on the viability and utility of our services and resources, particularly from the standpoint of how they accomplished their research. SCD wanted to gain insight into the workflow processes of users as they planned for and used SCD's services and resources. Users reported on their computational requirements and experiences using SCD's high-performance computing resources. The input from these two forums will be crucial as SCD moves toward developing a new strategic plan for the FY2005 - 2009 timeframe. Numerous suggestions arising from the forum have already been implemented, resulting in new introductory documentation, improvements to SCD's website, and support for the NetCDF Operators (NCO) product.

NCAR's Mass Storage System (MSS), recognized as one of NCAR's "crown jewels," passed a significant milestone at the end of FY2003. The NCAR MSS managed stored data exceeding 20.3 million files of over 880 unique terabytes (TB), totaling over 1,502 TB (1.5 petabytes) when including duplicate copies. This astounding amount of data continues to be managed efficiently and securely, ensuring scientists that they will be able to retrieve and store data crucial to their research. At end-FY2003, the MSS was growing by approximately 27 TB per month, and at that rate, it will double in size in 18 months. SCD continues to investigate new storage media technology in anticipation of MSS growth as well as to provide users with mechanisms to more effectively manage their data holdings.

These are but a few of the many activities that SCD's staff have undertaken during FY2003. As you read through this Annual Scientific Report, you will gain a greater appreciation of the level of support that SCD is committed to provide to NCAR, UCAR, and the greater atmospheric sciences research community. Behind these annual accomplishments however, is a level of infrastructural support that is literally without peer anywhere in the country. NCAR, as a national discipline-specific center, benefits enormously from the dedication and talented work of SCD's staff, many of whom work silently behind the scenes, to ensure that NCAR science advances in a seamless end-to-end, balanced, computing environment.

As we look forward to and plan for the future, we reflect here on the accomplishments of this past fiscal year. As always, we seek to provide the finest in computing, research, data storage, networking, analysis, visualization resources, and user support, teamed with a dedicated and talented staff, to help advance the understanding of our complex geophysical climate system.

I invite you to read the overview in the
Executive summary of SCD's FY2003 accomplishments
and the details in
SCD's FY2003 Annual Scientific Report.