Two new supercomputers named after a pair of iconic military meteorologists make up one powerful system now operational at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where it supports worldwide U.S. Army and Air Force weather modeling and forecasting operations.
The roots of this sophisticated computational tool trace back to a $25 million contract unveiled in 2019. It was since built and recently delivered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise to the Tennessee-based national lab managing it, according to a press release.
“The system was formally accepted in January and became fully operational on Feb. 8, 2021,” Computing and Facilities Director for the National Center for Computational Science at ORNL Jim Rogers, told Nextgov via email Wednesday. The lab “continues to actively conduct research on this system.”
The supercomputers power projects steered by ORNL and Air Force Weather, or AFW, the branch’s meteorology division that leverages atmospheric and solar data to provide comprehensive terrestrial and space weather alerts, forecasts and analyses for military efforts spanning the globe. Air Force officials named the new machines “Fawbush” and “Miller,” in homage to meteorologists Major Ernest Fawbush and Captain Robert Miller, who in 1948 predicted the first tornado forecast at the Tinker Air Force Base, the release noted.
Supercomputers’ capabilities are expressed by quantifying the number of floating-point operations per second, or “flops,” they can perform. A one petaflop system can complete one quadrillion floating-point operations per second—and combined, the new systems meet a peak performance of 7.2 petaflops. That’s roughly 6.5 times faster than AFW’s existing system, the release said, adding that the boost will enable “larger computatio ..
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