Extra computing prowess for the
community
Each year NCAR allocates time for hundreds of university scientists
on its formidable lineup of supercomputers. In 2007 NCAR gave a select
group of eight users up to 600,000 processor hours each—well
beyond the usual allocation—in order to accelerate high-end research
on topics ranging from tsunamis to Earth’s mantle. “Many
of these were processes we’d never simulated on our machines
before,” says Tom Bettge, operations and services director of
NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. The
turbocharged simulations were supported by the NSF-funded TeraGrid
project. Below is a depiction of seawater being mixed through a blend
of turbulence and convection. The modeling was carried out by William
Smyth and Satoshi Kimura (Oregon State University) and the visualization
was performed using VAPOR, the new Visualization and Analysis Platform
for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers. This open-source software
package for analyzing large amounts of data was created at CISL under
NSF support in collaboration with the University of California, Davis,
and Ohio State University.
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Seawater being mixed through a
blend of turbulence and convection. (Image courtesy William
Smyth and Satoshi Kimura, Oregon State University.) |
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