Group items tagged

"NOAA is recognized as a world leader in understanding and predicting the Earth's environment, through advanced modeling capabilities, climate research and real time weather products. The threat and growing concern of global climate change and its impact on national security, hurricanes, and other natural disasters has spurred growing public demand for climate and weather information with increased accuracy, shorter lead times and local detail of model simulations. "Members of the 110th Congress are introducing legislation related to global climate change at a faster pace than any previous Congress," according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. To meet this demand, NOAA scientists require leadership-class, high performance computing (HPC) systems with petaflops-scale capabilities (a petaflop is one million-billion operations per second). NOAA estimates that this performance requirement is similar to that of the top 10 supercomputing environments in the world. However, NOAA's high performance computing capabilities have fallen to more than an order of magnitude behind other U.S. agencies with leadership-class systems, such as the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, who also work on aspects of climate and weather research"