Dubbed the Blizzard, the world’s most powerful weather supercomputer powered by wind and other renewable forms of energy, computes, forecasts and analyzes climate data, level of greenhouse gases, and maritime and atmospheric reactions. Just recently, it was unveiled by the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) in Hamburg.
The massive installation weighing in at 35 tons is “60 times more powerful than its predecessors.” Doing over 158 trillion calculations per second and storing 60 petabytes of climate data, the supercomputer is supplying the COP15 delegates with invaluable data for discussion at Copenhagen’s conference this week.
Technical Specifications of Blizzard:
• 158 TFLOPS peak (top 500 position in the June List 2009: 27).
• IBM p575 Power6-based.
• 8448 CPU cores, 264 knots á 16 Dual-Core CPUs; 18.8 GFLOPS per core.
• 249 compute nodes, 12 I / O nodes and 3 nodes so-called interactive.
• 20 TiByte Memory.
• 3 petabytes of storage capacity is (twice 2011).
• Infiniband Interconnect (8 QLogic 288 ports 4x DDR, 16 GiByte / sec. Bi-directional bandwidth).
• 25,400 meters Inifiband cabling
Via: Treehugger