IBM SP-2 for Weather Forecasting at the 1996 Olympic Games
Zaphiris D. Christidis
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
zaphiri@watson.ibm.com
Introduction
The overall objective of this project is to provide accurate weather forecasts
for four main venues at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. These forecasts
will be made available to the media, the Olympic organizing committee,
participants, and spectators via dedicated kiosks. In addition, this information
will also be available on the IBM Olympic Games World Wide Web site.
In this effort, IBM is partnering with two governmental agencies: the
Forecasting Systems Laboratory (FSL) in Boulder, CO, which is part of the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Admininstration (NOAA); and the
National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), which is operated
by the National Weather Service. IBM Research is heavily involved in the
development of the numerical weather modeling code which will be run on
an IBM RISC System/6000 Scalable POWERParallel (SP-2) computer in Atlanta,
as well as in the development of advanced visualization capabilities to
faciliate dissemination of the computed weather forecasts. IBM Worldwide
Government Industry Solutions is providing overall coordination of the
project.
The specific objective of the Olympic capability is to be able to produce
forecasts of the weather over the next 6 to 12 hours for each of the four
Atlanta venues. In particular, the goal is to complete a new forecast for
two of the four sites every 3 hours; hence, each venue will have an updated
6-or 12-hour forecast every 6 hours.
To meet this very ambitious goal, we are working with FSL to develop
a highly optimized regional weather forecasting model (known as RAMS for
Regional Atmospheric Modeling System) that will fully exploit the parallel
processing power of the IBM SP computer installed in Atlanta.
This SP machine has a total of 30 processors. A RISC System 6000/39H
workstation with GXT1000-2 OpenGL graphics processor acts as 31st node
of the SP via dedicated networking to enable rapid access to the model
output for visualization and analysis.
The important technical aspect of this capability is that the RAMS regional
model, which is responsible for the simulations of the weather at the Atlanta
sites, will be coupled to a different global model which will be simulating
the weather across a much larger geographical region, e.g. all of North
America. This global weather model, known as Super-ETA, will be executed
on a NWS machine in Eagan, MN, using a relatively coarse resolution (approximately
8 km between grid points in the numerical model) of the Earth's surface.
The results of this global simulation will be periodically transmitted
via T1 links to the SP2 in Atlanta, which will then use this data as input
(specifically boundary conditions) to the subsequent execution on the SP2.
The SP-2 simulatons will use a much finer resolution (approximately
2 km) as well as more robust physical models in order to produce very accurate
regional forecasts in the Atlanta area. The extensive computational power
of the SP-2 will be needed to do such detailed simulations within the time
constraints discussed above. In addition, the RAMS model will accept as
observational data collected by the NWS in the Atlanta area.
zaphiri@watson.ibm.com
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