Technology Updates at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation

Overview

The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) supplies high-performance computing (HPC) and data services engineered to support climate simulations within NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Over the past few years, a number of technologies have emerged with the potential to change the landscape of HPC for climate simulations, including solid-state disks, NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), and Intel Xeon Phi Many Integrated Core (MIC) coprocessors.

Project Details

Throughout the past year, NCCS has focused on installing and integrating many of these advanced technologies into operational use within the HPC environment. The resulting changes have dramatically increased the overall theoretical computing capacity. However, they also have provided a challenge for both the operational teams responsible for maintaining the systems and the applications teams responsible for the next-generation climate models.

Results and Impact

Specific technology updates to the NCCS environment include:

• Adopting solid-state disks for the metadata subsystem within the Discover supercomputer's Global Parallel File System (GPFS).
• Integrating a ninth scalable compute unit (SCU9) into the Discover supercomputer. SCU9 contains 480 dual-socket Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge nodes (7,680 processor cores), more than 30 terabytes of memory, and a Fourteen Data Rate (FDR) InfiniBand network. These nodes are capable of housing additional coprocessor or GPU systems.
• Configuring a set of Intel Xeon Phi nodes to allow users to run in native, symmetric, or offload modes.
• Installing Kepler K10 and K20 GPU systems to allow users to explore the most advanced NVIDIA GPUs.
• Supporting the porting and tuning of climate models to accelerators like the Intel Xeon Phi and focusing on how to run and support these systems.

The NCCS operational team has learned a variety of lessons running these advanced systems within a secure operational environment.

Role of High-End Computing Resources

The applications being run on the NCCS Discover supercomputer contribute to the overall scientific knowledge about climate change. Coupled with a robust and growing data analysis capability, NCCS provides an environment in which large-scale climate models are executed, data is analyzed and visualized, and discoveries are made.