Derecho hardware delivered and installed at NWSC (updated)
Update 1/9/2023: All of the Derecho hardware has now been delivered and installed. More details in the CISL Daily Bulletin.
The first CPU racks for NCAR’s new supercomputer, Derecho, arrived at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) on December 6. A team quickly installed the eight new racks, more of which are scheduled for delivery in January.
NWSC’s Operations Manager, Michael Kercher, said, “It is extremely rewarding to see the last 24 months of planning, coordination, and layout come together in an orchestrated fashion. The NWSC facility team, construction contractors, and the HPE install team worked together to make the initial hardware install practically seamless for our operations.“
HPE engineering staff install the first eight racks of CPUs for NCAR's new supercomputer, Derecho, at the NWSC in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Derecho's remaining components, including its A100 GPUs, will be delivered and installed in January.
An HPE Cray EX supercomputer, Derecho is expected to more than triple the scientific throughput of the Cheyenne system by providing a peak speed of 19.87 petaflops (nearly 20 quadrillion floating-point operations per second). This improved capability will enable scientists to enhance the resolution and complexity of Earth system models, improve climate and weather research, and provide more accurate data to decision makers.
Some components of the new system will be put through their initial paces in a few weeks during a factory trial at the HPE facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, then shipped to the NWSC in January. The trial will test Derecho’s file system, a subset of its CPUs, and its GPUs. Once the full system is received at the NWSC and acceptance testing is completed, it will become available to early users in the spring.
In the meantime, CISL’s applications and user consulting teams continue their testing and development work on the test system for Derecho, called Gust, which is designed to prototype and mimic the hardware, software, user environment, and job execution configuration of Derecho.