Predicting weather and climate accurately using high-performance computing to keep Antarctic researchers and crew safe

About the customer

The United States (U.S.) National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) is a world-class research center leading, promoting and facilitating innovation in the atmospheric and Earth systems sciences. NSF NCAR provides the science community with state-of-the-art resources, including supercomputers, sophisticated computer models and extensive datasets. Its HPE Cray EX “Derecho” supercomputer – named after a powerful windstorm by an eighth-grade contest winner in Wyoming, where Derecho is located – delivers high-performance computing (HPC) to scientists and researchers at universities across the globe.

Their challenge

At Antarctica’s McMurdo Station, extreme weather is a given. Average temperatures there hover around -1 °F (-18 °C) but have dipped as low as -58 °F (-50 °C). Antarctica is the coldest and windiest of Earth’s continents – it is also the driest and is technically a desert. Snowfall and limited visibility are constant factors, and winds can whip to 50 miles per hour (mph) and beyond. The station hosts a crew of more than 1,000 people at peak season, and teams conduct research in aeronomy, astrophysics and geospace sciences, biology and ecosystems, geology and geophysics, glaciology, geomorphology, ice cores and ocean and climate systems. It is a scientific gold mine despite its location on the planet’s most inhospitable continent. Accurate weather reports in this harsh Antarctic climate are crucial to ensure that travel is safe and researchers and crew are not surprised by blizzards or other extreme phenomena.

The crew at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station depends on NSF NCAR’s twice-daily weather reports to stay safe in the harsh polar climate.

Our solution

NSF NCAR supercomputers, with workload orchestration by HPCWorks™ PBS Professional™ software, provide McMurdo Station and the U.S. Antarctic Program with the twice-daily reports they rely on to stay safe in the harsh polar climate. The Antarctic Mesoscale Prediction System (AMPS) that makes this possible is an experimental, real-time numerical weather prediction capability that provides support for Antarctic science and international Antarctic efforts. The 19.87-petaflops Derecho system at the NSF NCAR Wyoming Supercomputing Center is the newest powerhouse system behind the complex calculations that produce these critical AMPS reports. HPCWorks is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Weather and climate prediction involves an ever-changing host of complex variables, and modeling the Earth’s weather and climate is a massive, important challenge that requires powerful HPC systems and software that can handle the most demanding workloads. Using the fast, powerful HPCWorks PBS Professional workload manager improves productivity, optimizes utilization and efficiency and simplifies administration for clusters, clouds and supercomputers, including Top 500 systems like Derecho. NSF NCAR chose Siemens Digital Industries Software in part because of its long history of providing leading institutions with technology that ensures climate modeling and simulation workloads run quickly and efficiently and maximize HPC resources.

“The Derecho supercomputer will provide the necessary resources for our scientists to continue expanding their research in the atmospheric and geospatial sciences,” says Irfan Elahi, HPC division director at NSF NCAR. “To provide this capability, the new supercomputer is designed for highly energy-efficient operations, which can be monitored by using HPCWorks PBS Professional for collecting and reporting on job energy usage.”