These NCAR supercomputing, data storage, and archive systems support the development of climate models, weather forecasting, and other critical research.
Access to these resources is available through several allocation opportunities. Researchers who are supported by the National Science Foundation to pursue work in the atmospheric sciences or computational science in support of the atmospheric sciences are eligible to apply. Unsponsored graduate students, postdocs, and new faculty can apply for small allocations.
Derecho, the new supercomputer NCAR installed in 2023, features 2,488 compute nodes with 128 AMD Milan cores per node and 82 nodes with four NVIDIA A100 GPUs each. The HPE Cray EX cluster is a 19.87-petaflops system that is expected to deliver about 3.5 times the scientific throughput of the Cheyenne system.
The Casper cluster is a heterogeneous system of specialized analysis and visualization resources and large-memory, multi-GPU nodes. In addition to nodes configured for analysis and visualization, it includes others that feature large-memory, dense GPU configurations to support explorations in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) in atmospheric and related sciences.
Users who are new to working with GPUs, which will provide 20% of the peak computing capability of the Derecho system, can request access to Casper to get a head start on using that increasingly important technology.
The NCAR Campaign Storage file system is intended for use by the NCAR labs and universities as space for storing project data on publication timescales. The disk-based system has a five-year data-retention policy.
The Quasar archive is a cold archive for storing curated data collections that have an indefinite lifetime. It is not designed to serve data or to store data that will be frequently accessed, overwritten, or deleted. (Active data should be on GLADE or Campaign Storage rather than on Quasar.)
See Quasar archive for data collections.
Stratus, the CISL object storage disk system, is for write-once, read-many (WORM), long-term data storage.
