IBM has announced the delivery of a new 76-teraflop supercomputing cluster that will be used for climate modeling by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO.
Consisting of 4,064 4.7GHz Power6 processors, 12 terabytes of memory, and 150 terabytes of disk storage, the cluster will not only be used for Earth-friendly studies, but will be a step forward in Earth-friendly hardware as well. The system, which is being called "Bluefire," is a Power 575 supercomputer, a new class of IBM hardware that uses a water cooling system that IBM claims is 33 percent more efficient than air-cooled systems, and which should reduce energy usage by up to a factor of three for each rack.
NCAR scientists will use the new machine for researching future patterns of precipitation and drought, and to look into the effect of global warming on hurricanes.
