The Nasa Centre for Climate Simulation has provided supercomputing resources to Nasa scientists and engineers for over 25 years.
"Computation here at Goddard is primarily to create datasets and make them available for science researchers around the world," said Phil Webster, chief of Goddard's Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office, which includes NCCS. With climate and weather modelling representing the bulk of NCCS computing, the centre reflects "our mission to support Nasa Earth science."
The Nasa Centre for Climate Simulation Data Exploration Theatre features a 17- by six-foot multi-screen visualisation wall for engaging visitors and scientists with high-definition movies of simulation results. Here, the wall displays a 3.5-kilometer-resolution global simulation that captures numerous cloud types at groundbreaking fidelity.
The heart of NCCS is the "Discover" supercomputer. In 2009, NCCS added more than 8,000 computer processors to Discover, for a total of nearly 15,000 processors. Discover-hosted simulations span time scales from days (weather prediction) to seasons and years (short-term climate prediction) to decades and centuries (climate change projection).
The Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications is producing a comprehensive record of Earth's weather and climate from 1979, the beginning of the operational Earth observing satellite era, up to the present.
At any time scale, Nasa climate simulations use and produce vast amounts of data. "The unique thing about Nasa is that it is the source of most of the research satellite observational data of the atmosphere, land, and ocean," Mr Webster said. Adding data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other sources, and GMAO needs to process as many as eight million observations from satellites and additional platforms per day before assimilating them into models.
Data assimilation and other techniques create the right starting conditions for simulating physical processes around the Earth. In predicting future conditions, climate models generate data much like the observations: Temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation, and other values. Data processing requirements can be considerable. The largest project run at NCCS to date - GMAO's Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) - ingests more than 50 billion observations over the Earth Observing System satellite era. MERRA will eventually produce more than 150 terabytes (tera = trillion) of value-added Earth science data.
The heart of the NCCS is the "Discover" supercomputer. In 2009, NCCS added more than 8,000 computer processors to Discover, for a total of nearly 15,000 processors.
In addition to powerful computers, NCCS has long had a massive data archive for researchers to store, and later retrieve, model output and other data.
Source: Nasa