The National Oceanography Centre (NOC) achieves new ocean simulation results using Bull's high performance computing solution
TeraNova, a cluster of Bull NovaScale servers, has been used by NOC's to perform high-end simulations
Heidelberg,
June
21, 2005 -
The National Oceanography Centre in Southampton is one of the world's leading centres for research and education in marine and earth sciences.
The oceans play a key role in the climate system but the difficulties of sustaining observations of anything other than the ocean's surface make good modelling of the ocean critical to advancing our understanding of potential changes in our environment. To simulate these effects, ocean models must use grids with spatial resolutions of less than 10km horizontally and have a vertical resolution of less than 10m. (See three images in figure 1).
The computing power required to achieve model integrations of worthwhile length (at least 30 model years) and adequate resolution (1/12o longitude= 9.3km at the equator) is enormous. Backed-up with 320 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and 1.2 TB of memory organized in a cluster of twenty 16 way NovaScale servers, TeraNova enables an efficient simulation with 608M grid cells.
"TeraNova demonstrates impressive scalability and copes extremely well with the intense I/O requirements. I was pleased to be able to try out the Bull NovaScale servers on a demanding problem" said Dr. Andrew C. Coward. "With sustained access to such facilities we could accelerate our research. My experiences show that Bull can offer a complete solution that meets our needs and can back this up with strong support services."
NOC accessed the TeraNova platform in 2005 to run its 1/12° model with additional relevant physics packages. One of these packages involves a representation of mixing within the ocean, taking into account the local gradient in terms of density and mix preferentially within stratified layers (as does the real ocean). The run achieved on TeraNova is probably the highest resolution global ocean model ever integrated with such complete physics. (Figure 2 illustrates a feature of the real ocean which this model has been able to simulate).
"Bull is very pleased that new important results in Science are achieved thanks to our NovaScale servers. Bull is committed to bringing HPC solutions with exceptional performance/price ratio to the research community, thus enabling new discoveries" commented Jean-François Lavignon, Director of HPC solutions at Bull.
Figure 2: The salinity at 1000m in the North Atlantic (blue-low salinity; red-high salinity). In reality, high salinity water from the Mediterranean flows over the shallow sill in the Strait of Gibraltar and descends into the lighter Atlantic waters as a narrow boundary current around the Gulf of Cadiz. This is a difficult feature to model, requiring both high resolution and low numerical diffusion. The image shown here shows the salinity field after 35 days simulation on the TeraNova system. The high salinity water can clearly be seen forming realistic features very similar to those observed in the area.
About the National Oceanography Centre
The National Oceanography Centre (NOC) opened in 1995 and is a purpose-built development creating a centre for some 450 research scientists, lecturing and support staff as well over 600 undergraduate and postgraduate students. With a turnover of around £20 million per annum, the Centre's objective is clear and ambitious: to play a strategic role in global interdisciplinary marine and earth sciences.
About Bull, Architect of an Open World
As one of the leading European IT companies, Bull delivers open, flexible and secure information systems. The group helps public and private sector customers transform their information systems, applying its know-how and expertise in three main areas:
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Capitalizing on its extensive mainframe experience, Bull designs and produces robust, innovative and open servers, based on industry-standard technologies;
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Building on its alliances with leading ISVs, Bull develops and implements flexible and interoperable application infrastructures which give business processes the freedom to evolve;
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Bringing together recognized expertise in end-to-end IT security, Bull secures data and exchanges that are so critical in preserving customers' business integrity.
Bull has a particularly strong presence in the public, healthcare, finance, telecommunications, manufacturing and defense sectors. Its distribution network and business partners cover more than 60 countries worldwide.
For more information visit: http://www.bull.com
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