Engineers are installing a new IBM computer system – dubbed “blueice” – that will triple the computing power of the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The upgraded system will give the center one of the most powerful computing systems in the world.
“The scientific desire for computing power is insatiable,” said NCAR’s Tom Engel, a high-performance-computing specialist.
To predict the erratic behavior of a Western wildfire and calculate how automobile and power-plant emissions are changing the climate, NCAR scientists and their university collaborators need computer speed – lots of it, Engel said.
The new computer – which won’t be in scientific use until February – can perform 12 trillion calculations a second, Engel said.
“If you had everybody in the U.S. sitting down with a calculator, they couldn’t keep up with it,” he said. “You’d need 400 million U.S.’s.”
NCAR researchers run computer models based on detailed physics and chemistry to predict how a changing atmosphere will affect the world’s temperatures, ice and oceans.
They run models to predict wildfire behavior and models that demonstrate how invisible air turbulence can affect airplanes.
IBM will replace blueice in 18 months with an even faster system, the computer company reported.
“This one won’t make the top 10, but the following one will be close,” Engel said.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
