Press Release

University of Colorado Scientists Gain Insights Into Earth's Atmosphere with Help from SGI Systems

With New SGI Altix System, Researchers Now Can ‘Apply More Science’ to Understanding Layer Between Troposphere and Stratosphere

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (October 25, 2006)— With a swelling influx of information captured by data-gathering spacecraft, scientists with the University of Colorado (CU) are using some of the world’s most powerful Linux® systems from SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) to learn all they can about the ever-changing layer between the earth’s lower and upper atmospheres.

Earlier this year, CU acquired an 80-processor SGI® Altix® system to analyze data obtained for a project known as HIRDLS, or High-Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder, an effort pursued jointly by CU and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Purchased through James River Technical, Inc., SGI’s exclusive higher education reseller, the Altix system was installed in April at CU-Boulder specifically to compute HIRDLS data.

The HIRDLS team captures raw telemetry data from such spacecraft as NASA’s Aura satellite, and then pre-processes it into bit counts using other computer systems. The group purchased the SGI Altix system for the computationally intensive next step: converting the basic infrared radiation measurements into common atmospheric quantities such as temperature, ozone, water, nitric oxide and aerosols.

To handle the task, CU stocked the SGI Altix system with 160GB of memory and running SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 9 from Novell® and SGI ProPack™ 4 for Linux®.

The atmospheric layer that CU is studying with HIRDLS data is called the tropopause, and is found anywhere between 4 and 11 miles above the earth. The tropopause is a transitional layer that sits between the troposphere, the layer closest to the earth in which weather systems occur, and the stratosphere, where the ozone layer is located.

"The more we learn about this transitional region, the better we’ll understand weather trends and long-term climate change," said Daniel Packman, system administrator for the HIRDLS project at the University of Colorado. "For instance, by processing this data, we’re able to generate detailed pictures of the ozone hole. As a result, climate change studies are greatly aided by our research."

Packman said the Altix system helps compute the complex spatial and temporal resolution of gravity waves. Gravity waves are among the most difficult phenomena to physically measure in the tropopause, but they can play a key role in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere. "The HIRDLS data, processed on the Altix system, allows us to clearly see these waves traveling in this region," said Packman.

Before acquiring the Altix system, the CU team split its conversion problem into eight separate tasks, which were handled independently. With the new 80-processor SGI Altix system, results can be achieved more efficiently.

"We need a certain level of performance to process our data," Packman said. "This system gives us more power than we had before, so we can process a single stream faster and process a given data set in multiple simultaneous versions. Simply put, we can apply more science to the problem."

The HIRDLS project is a joint collaboration with British researchers. John Gille is the U.S. principal investigator for HIRDLS.

The SGI Altix family leverages the built-in SGI NUMAlink™ interconnect fabric, which allows global addressing of all memory in the system and delivers data up to 200 times faster than conventional interconnects. For the first time, more complex data sets and complete workflows can be driven entirely out of memory, enabling productivity breakthroughs that traditional Linux clusters or repurposed UNIX® servers can't achieve. Altix systems offer breakthrough flexibility and configurability, scaling to up to 1,024 processors per node. Based on a 64-bit Linux® operating environment, the Altix family is uniquely capable of independently scaling Intel® Itanium® 2 processors, shared memory and/or I/O on a single, standard chassis with different expansion modules, providing optimal resource usage for demanding technical applications.

HIRDLS Uniquely Observes Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSCs) in Cold Northern Hemisphere Polar Region (PDF 852K)

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