NASA Center for Climate Simulation: Data-Centric Climate Computing

Overview

The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) offers integrated supercomputing, visualization, and data interaction technologies to enhance NASA's weather and climate prediction capabilities. It serves hundreds of users at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as other NASA centers, laboratories, and universities across the U.S.

Project Details

Climate science is extremely data-intensive. Its tools integrate millions of observations collected daily with increasingly high-resolution mathematical models. Reanalysis of past observations and climate model simulations can produce datasets in the hundreds of terabytes.

These challenges require data-centric computing designed for effective manipulation of large datasets. Accordingly, NCCS's Discover supercomputer underwent several processor upgrades this year, bringing its peak performance to nearly 400 teraflops. In addition, a new cluster of 64 graphics processing units (GPUs) is supporting science application porting, testing, and scaling studies.

NCCS maintains a supercomputing-class data analysis capability, with links to a 17- by 6-foot interactive visualization wall. A global file system and Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) data management tools make data available to all services. The NCCS Data Portal and Earth System Grid (ESG) Data Node enable external scientists and decision makers to access simulation data.

Results and Impact

With these expanded capabilities, NCCS users are advancing weather and climate science. NASA Goddard's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) can now complete a 3-day, 3.5-kilometer global weather forecast within 24 hours and can run their Goddard Earth Observing System 5 (GEOS-5) atmosphere model at high resolutions with interactive chemistry. A 10-kilometer GEOS-5 "Nature Run"—the highest-resolution atmospheric simulation of its kind—modeled 2 years of Earth's climate for observing system simulation experiments.

GMAO and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) are major contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report. GMAO is using coupled atmosphere-ocean-land models to simulate 10- and 30-year climate scenarios for the 21^st century. GISS coupled atmosphere-ocean models are performing historical simulations reaching back to the year 1000 and projections of climate through the year 2100. NASA IPCC simulation data is available to the climate community via the ESG Data Node.

Role of High-End Computing Resources

Role of High-End Computing Resources The high-resolution GEOS-5 and IPCC simulations would be impossible without the recent addition of more than 20,000 current-generation Intel Westmere processors to the Discover supercomputer. When run at high resolutions, GEOS-5 scales to as many as 13,824 processors and regularly utilizes 4,000 or more processors at a time. Already a large user of NCCS resources, GISS's computational workload has more than doubled since 2010.