1 PSC update July 3, 2008 Ralph Roskies, Scientific Director Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

2 Pople (Altix) update 768 Intel Itanium II (Montvale) cores, 1.5 TB of shared memory, 5.1 TFlop/s. Delivered February 38 friendly user groups used time before July 1 Moved from friendly usage to production July 1 Running smoothly Integrated into PSC environment New communities (game theory, agent-based epidemiology, functional imaging, machine learning, analysis of census data) Allocated more than half a years’ computing at the June MRAC, so will be busy from first day of production Hybrid Programming Workshop Sept 8-11

3 Storm prediction Ming Xue, U. of Oklahoma 6 week run (mid April-beginning of June, tornado season) to test the ability of storm-scale ensemble prediction under real forecasting conditions for US east of the Rockies. Ensemble forecasting at storm scale (had been used for larger scale models). 10-member ensembles (at 4 km resolution) ran for 6.5 to 9.5 hours each day, using 66 Cray XT3 processors at PSC. One 600 processor high resolution model (2 km resolution) ran for 9 hours. >100× more computing daily than the most sophisticated National Weather Service operational forecasts.. Real-time in a simulated operational environment First time use of observational data from over 120 weather radars to initialize thunderstorms in the prediction model

4 Storm Modeling RR visited OU, which houses National Severe Storm Laboratory and NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center late May to observe use of the data Researchers and forecasters work symbiotically Impressed that this is still an art Work was featured in The Weekly Reader, reaches 9M children and 500,000 teachers. CAPS provided the content, PSC provided animations. See

5 XT3 OS upgrade Moving to Unicos/lc Improves performance of Lustre Updates various science libraries July (two days for upgrade, one for testing)