Four nominees for the 2022 HPCwire Readers' Choice Awards are on the ballot for projects demonstrating exceptional NCAR accomplishments in the use of high-performance computing resources, including the Cheyenne and Casper systems.

HPCwire subscribers can review all of the nominees and vote by October 7 (not for yourself or your own organization, but feel free to spread the word with your non-NCAR contacts). Here are summaries of the NCAR work that has been nominated.

Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences – The ballot describes how NCAR scientists successfully used an interactive global atlas, an extremely high-resolution computer simulation of ocean circulation, to identify possible “thermal refugia” where coral reefs are most likely to survive warming ocean temperatures that threaten their existence. The scientists use Cheyenne and Casper to process and visualize more than 400 terabytes of data from the largest ocean simulation ever conducted.

Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences – NCAR was nominated for developing the GPU-based FastEddy model, which can run weather forecasts at a resolution of just five meters (16 feet). Trained primarily on the Casper cluster, the model is capable of providing real-time weather hazard avoidance at the microscale level and allows scientists to predict how weather and buildings in an urban environment affect drones and other small aerial vehicles.

Best HPC Response to Societal Plight (Urgent Computing, COVID-19) – NCAR scientists were nominated for developing a new way to accurately predict summer rainfall in certain regions, enabling better management of dwindling water resources. Using Cheyenne, they applied a specialized algorithm to the long-range forecasts of the leading weather models to determine how to make more accurate predictions months in advance.

Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence – A collaboration involving NCAR scientists and HPE led to the first demonstration of using high-throughput, machine-learning predictions inside an ensemble of realistic ocean climate model simulations, showing a 20% improvement in the predicted quantity of data points over the previous industry best, establishing a new standard.