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IBM has just delivered a new 76-teraflops super computer to National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The supercomputer, known as a Power 575 Hydro- Cluster, is the first in a highly energy-efficient class of machines to be shipped anywhere in the world.
FLOPS is an acronym meaning “FLoating point Operations Per Second”. The FLOPS is a measure of a computer’s performance. One teraflop is one trillion floating point operations per second.

The super computer will be used in advance research on severe weather and the future of Earth’s climate. Scientists at NCAR and across the country will use the new system to accelerate research into climate change, including future patterns of precipitation and drought around the world, changes to agriculture and growing seasons, and the complex influence of global warming on hurricanes. Researchers also will use it to improve weather forecasting models so society can better anticipate where and when dangerous storms may strike.

Named “Bluefire,” the new supercomputer has a peak speed of more than 76 teraflops (76 trillion floating-point operations per second). When fully operational, it is expected to rank among the 25 most powerful supercomputers in the world and will more than triple NCAR’s sustained computing capacity.

According to Tom Bettge, director of operations and services for NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory:

Bluefire is on the leading edge of high-performance computing technology. Increasingly fast machines are vital to research into such areas as climate change and the formation of hurricanes and other severe storms. Scientists will be able to conduct breakthrough calculations, study vital problems at much higher resolution and complexity, and get results more quickly than before.

Researchers will rely on bluefire to generate the climate simulations necessary for the next report on global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which conducts detailed assessments under the auspices of the United Nations. The IPCC was a recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.