Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Next month The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will bring a new data center online. The facility in Fairmont, West Virginia will support a 383-teraflop supercomputer designed to develop more powerful tools for analyzing the behavior of hurricanes. NOAA staffers discussed the project in a presentation last week at the AFCOM Data Center World fall conference in Orlando.
Computer Models Improving
Hurricane scientists have developed sophisticated computer models to analyze the threat posed by hurricanes. This has helped forecasters make significant strides in projecting the path a hurricane will take. But it remains more difficult to predict the intensity of hurricanes, which can fluctuate in strength as they approach landfall. Hurricane intensity is ranked on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which assigns a category from 1 to 5, with Category 5 storms being the most powerful.
“The damage caused by the hurricane has almost everything to do with intensity,” said NOAA’s Darren Smith, who said predicting the intensity requires granular data.”The physics of a hurricane occur at a 1 kilometer resolution.”
The new supercomputer in West Virginia will bring more horsepower to test new models designed to better measure intensity. But it will also require about five years of development before the new model is ready for use in NOAA forecasts.
More Capacity Required
Analyzing hurricane data requires lots of computing power. NOAA has 9 supercomputers already, but none of its existing facilities had the space or power capacity to house the new machine. Smith and his team began an unusual site selection process in which they picked a location for the new facility without knowing what kind of supercomputer it would house.
They didn’t know, for example, whether the supercomputer would require water cooling or air cooling. The agency eventually chose an SGI Altix ICE cluster in which some cabinets will be water-cooled (through a rear-door cooling unit) while others will use air cooling.
Cabinets in the high performance computing cluster will use up to 33 watts of power per rack. The data center will use full outside air cooling (air economization) for 40 percent of the year, while using a mix of economizers and chillers the remainder of the time. The economizers are expected to save about $800,000 a year in power costs.
The 54,000 square foot space will house 16,000 square feet of computer room space on a 4-foot raised floor, and a 6,000 square foot tape archive, with room for expansion of both. The facility has 6 megawatts of power capacity, and is supported by a flywheel UPS system.
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Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Weather Services Forecasters issued their forecast for the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season which begins June 1, leaving an expectation of 15 tropical storms, with eight evolving into hurricanes. Of those, four are expected to strengthen into major hurricane of Category 3 or above on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which mean the storm packs sustained winds of 111-130 mph and is expected to cause serious damage.
Each of the forecasts exceeds what is considered the historical average hurricane season, although what is defined as “average” varies somewhat according to the source. Predictions for 2011 do fall within the level of activity that has occurred during an active tropical period that began in 1995, says Crawford. Since 1995 the season has averaged 15 named storms, eight hurricanes and four intense hurricanes. The 2010 season, one of the most active in recent decades, brought 19 tropical storms. Twelve of those became hurricanes and five grew into major hurricanes.
