Oak Ridge National Laboratory has launched the fifth Gaea supercomputer for use in climate science research.
The C5 system was commissioned in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and will be operated by ORNL’s National Climate-Computing Research Center, the laboratory said Wednesday.
NOAA and the Department of Energy established NCRC in 2009 as part of efforts to enhance modeling and simulation capabilities for critical climate studies. Since then, the center has been installing, testing and running Gaea systems.
Gaea C5 was developed by Cray, a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to perform twice as fast as its previous versions. Its peak theoretical performance reaches 10 million billion calculations per second in terms of exascale computing.
The ORNL team is currently addressing functional issues with C5 and has yet to open the supercomputer to NOAA users. NCRC rotates the utilization of supercomputers to prevent interrupted access to more powerful systems at NOAA, as well as to minimize costs of operations and maintenance.
