According to the historical chart of NCAR’s production and experimental systems, the last SGI machine used by NCAR was an Origin 3800 machine called “Tempest” that saw duty in the early to middle 2000s. Driving Hardware And Softwareĭecades ago, when supercomputing was new, NCAR was a big Cray shop, and it dabbling a bit with Thinking Machines and IBM iron in the 1980s and 1990s with an occasional machine from Hewlett-Packard/Compaq, Linux Networx, or SGI in the mix. “We have done better than our plan for large systems for the year, so we are happy with that,” says Broner. To chase similar big deals, SGI has created what it calls the Strategic Program Office, which leverages the experience of selling large systems to try to win new deals – a recognition that at certain scales and for certain customers, lessons learned from one deal can be applied to other deals and help SGI better close big business. Their focus is on multi-year climate research, but the fact that NCAR is going to be developing new algorithms to, for example, better predict hurricanes or to do what they call streamflow to predict how water is going to flow over the landscape and be captured in reservoirs in a year-long timeframe, is going to help agriculture and cities plan weather for the next year.” NCAR is an important customer in that they are research institution that is going to develop new codes that other organizations are going to use. On our team we have added a vertical leader and we have added application experts in the weather and climate space. “We are clearly excited about the deal with NCAR, and one of the things that we have been doing even before I became general manager of the HPC unit is a renewed focus on weather and climate. Broner took over the helm of the HPC business within SGI last year, returning to the company after stints at Ericsson and Microsoft, and had previously been in charge of SGI’s storage business and an operating system architect at Cray Research prior to that. “We had incumbency in a number of weather centers, but with NCAR, we have not sold to them in a number of years,” Gabriel Broner, general manager of the high performance computing business unit at SGI, tells The Next Platform.
We will get into the feeds and speeds of Cheyenne and how it compares to Yellowstone in a minute, but one interesting thing about the future NCAR system is that SGI has partnered with DataDirect Networks to win the deal to build the Cheyenne system away from a bunch of other possible contenders. These two petaflops-class machines will run side-by-side for a while until the newer one is fully operational. The forthcoming system, nicknamed “Cheyenne,” will be housed in the same Wyoming Supercomputing Center where the Yellowstone system was installed in 2012, which is located in Cheyenne, Wyoming and hence the name of the system. Early next year, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the United States is going to be replacing its current 1.5 petaflops “Yellowstone” massively parallel Xeon system with a kicker based on future Xeon chips from Intel that will weigh in at an estimated 5.34 petaflops and offer the weather and climate modeling research organization lots more oomph to run its simulations. The first big supercomputing deal of the new year has been unveiled.