Yellowstone is the petascale computing resource in the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC), which opened in October 2012 in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Yellowstone is a 1.5-petaflops high-performance computing system with 72,288 processor cores, 144.6 TB of memory, and 29 times the workload throughput of NCAR’s Bluefire supercomputer, which was decommissioned January 31, 2013.

As shown in the diagram below, Yellowstone is integrated with a centralized file system and data storage system known as GLADE, which provides 15 times the sustained I/O bandwidth and 12 times the capacity of the previous GLADE system.

The Geyser and Caldera systems provide a 20-fold increase in CISL’s dedicated data analysis and visualization resources. With 1 TB of memory per node, Geyser is designed to facilitate large-scale data analysis and post-processing tasks, including 3D visualization; Caldera has two NVIDIA Tesla GPUs per node to support parallel processing, visualization activities, and development and testing of general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) code.

Taken together, these components dramatically improve capabilities central to NCAR’s mission, such as supporting the development of climate models, weather forecasting, and other critical research. NWSC serves researchers across the United States and around the world who interact with its systems remotely.