
NOAA kicks off 2018 with massive supercomputer upgrade - el_duderino
http://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-kicks-off-2018-with-massive-supercomputer-upgrade
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sigmar
The GFS model has been embarrassingly bad in comparison to Europe's ECMWF
models. Here's to hoping it will be more competitive in 2019.

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brootstrap
embarrassingly bad according to what? At my work we use the GFS data and our
customers are extremely pleased with the data we provide.

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labster
The GFS was bad at tropical weather this year. Though I have to say, the GFS
has been a little less crazy in long term forecasts on the US West Coast
lately.

Not sure how much processing power will improve the tropical storm forecasts,
though. I had the impression that had to do more with the model's physics.
Though it would be nice to catch up with the ECMWF's data assimilation
prowess, that would definitely help.

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pinewurst
It's interesting that Dell won this one. Sadly there's not a lot of technical
info about the system itself or the big storage expansion (probably more
Lustre, sadly - my tax dollars at work).

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SEJeff
But would GPFS _really_ be any better? What other competition is there for big
iron hpc distributed storage?

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pinewurst
Lustre nominally scales higher than GPFS, but GPFS is more reliable and better
performing for anything having to do with metadata. It's also a lot more
expensive license-wise. There's other competition, but it's not proven at
these scale levels. Top 500 deals are bad business so it's not really worth it
to develop/test for them thus leaving the business to the incumbents (e.g. the
dumpster fire that's IBM or the Arkham Asylum that's Lustre).

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SEJeff
FYI I work directly with the amazing guy who wrote this:
[https://csc.fi/web/blog/post/-/blogs/the-largest-
unplanned-o...](https://csc.fi/web/blog/post/-/blogs/the-largest-unplanned-
outage-in-years-and-how-we-survived-it)

Lustre at scale is a disaster, but one you can pay for people to help you
with. GPFS is unbelievably expensive, but is a lot more reliable wrt metadata,
but it is also quite fragile.

In my original question, I mean other than the obvious one of Lustre.

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JohnJamesRambo
So many acronyms in this thread...I wish I knew what any of them mean.

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pinewurst
Feel free to ask for definitions!

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spyspy
No mention of their Gaea supercomputer at Oak Ridge. I wonder if it's still
operational.

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Infernal
[http://knoxblogs.com/atomiccity/2016/04/28/noaas-
supercomput...](http://knoxblogs.com/atomiccity/2016/04/28/noaas-
supercomputer-upgraded/)

Looks like they shut it down April 2016.

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t-brown
Gaea is still up and running. The C? names are sub-components, so currently
Gaea is C3.

[https://rdhpcs.noaa.gov/](https://rdhpcs.noaa.gov/)

[https://www.ncrc.gov/](https://www.ncrc.gov/)

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Infernal
D'oh. I did not even completely read my own link - extra embarrassing as I sit
in the same building as this cluster...

