About CISL

CISL's mission is to support and advance the geosciences with world-class computing, data management and research in mathematics and computational science. CISL realizes this mission by providing:

• High-performance computing and expertise needed for the development and execution of large, long-running numerical simulations
• A data archiving and management system that is balanced in performance and capacity relative to computational resources
• High-speed network and data communication capabilities that are balanced with respect to computational facilities, storage facilities, and the requirements of a national and international community
• Research datasets and expertise needed by atmospheric and related sciences
• A computing environment and support services that emphasize user productivity and cost-effectiveness
• Education and training in computing and related technologies with an emphasis on under-represented groups with the UCAR Foundation
• A center of activity for the mathematical and geophysical communities that applies mathematics to fundamental issues in the geosciences

40 years of operational expertise

NCAR has provided computing resources and services to the atmospheric science research community since its inception in 1960. The NCAR Computing Facility was formally organized in 1964 and became the Scientific Computing Division (SCD) in 1980.

Applied Mathematics Research

In 2005, the Computational & Information Systems Laboratory was formed by the merger of SCD and the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe). IMAGe is an exciting effort to encourage the development of new mathematical tools and models and facilitates connections between the mathematical and geophysical communities. The creation of IMAGe brings new breadth to an already full CISL portfolio of IT and computer science research projects.

Supercomputers, data storage, and networking

Today, CISL manages and operates:

• Supercomputers – technical and commodity supercomputers with an aggregate capacity of over 100 teraflops peak.
• Data Analysis and Visualization Clusters – resources for interactive data analysis and visualization tasks requiring large memory, specialized software, and hardware-accelerated graphics.
• Central File System – a 1.8-petabyte high- performance shared file system that supports shared work spaces common across CISL's HPC and DAV resources.
• High-Performance Storage System – archives and serves over 600 terabytes of atmospheric and related research data, over 8 petabytes of data used in supercomputing simulations, and a current total capacity of more than 12 petabytes.
• Network – high-speed, reliable, secure network connectivity to five campuses that requires support of over 150 logical networks, approximately 180 monitored network devices, and more than 4,700 network-attached devices, plus management commitments to additional municipal and wide-area networks
• Computing Center – a sophisticated computing center that houses our supercomputers and enterprise servers, with a professional operations staff who provide support 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.

Quick response to problems is ensured by continual monitoring of all systems and a formal protocol for monitoring, diagnosing, and reporting problems. Low-level situations are handled by CISL computer specialists, while higher-priority situations are immediately called or paged in to designated hardware, software, or network engineers from CISL or the appropriate vendor. A trouble-ticket system logs and tracks all reports, providing an efficient process for problem escalation and solution.

Serving user communities

CISL offers services and support to over 1,000 users at more than 200 sites. The division supplies computing resources to two communities of researchers,

• Community Computing Facility – provides high-performance computing to support the NCAR scientific program and meet the needs of university researchers in atmospheric and related sciences
• Climate Simulation Laboratory (CSL) – a multiagency facility established in 1995, CSL provides high-performance computing, data storage, and data analysis systems to support coupled climate models and large ensembles of climate prediction models.
• TeraGrid – sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the TeraGrid uses high-performance networks and grid software to integrate supercomputers, data repositories, and special-purpose data analysis and visualization facilities through the United States. As a TeraGrid resource provider since June 2006, NCAR makes a portion of its computational resources available to researchers through TeraGrid.