U.S. Air Force Advances Weather Forecasting for Defense Missions with 6.5X Faster Supercomputer Built by Hewlett Packard Ente...
February 10 2021 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
A new system, powered by the HPE Cray EX supercomputers and now
operational at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, introduces new forecasting capabilities across
atmospheric and solar weather conditions to aid military aircraft
planning and execution of missions worldwide
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced that through a
strategic partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak
Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), HPE has built a new supercomputer
for the United States Air Force to support weather modeling and
forecasting projects to aid U.S. Army and Air Force missions
worldwide. The new system, powered by the HPE Cray EX
supercomputers, is now operational at ORNL in Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
where it is managed by ORNL’s high performance computing systems
team. Air Force Weather, the Air Force’s meteorology division, will
leverage the new system to support research and development needs
in addition to its operational role.
The new system is comprised of two supercomputers that the U.S.
Air Force has named “Fawbush” and “Miller” after meteorologists
Major Ernest Fawbush and Captain Robert Miller, who predicted the
first tornado forecast at the Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma in
1948.
Fawbush and Miller, combined, are 6.5 times faster than Air
Force Weather’s existing system allowing larger computations at a
higher resolution, increasing accuracy in global weather
simulations from 17 kilometers between model grid points to 10
kilometers. The Air Force Weather uses the weather intelligence,
across atmospheric and solar data, when delivering ongoing alerts,
analyses and forecasts to U.S. defense missions worldwide to help
military aircraft mitigate weather conditions and achieve
readiness.
U.S. Air Force Begins Use of World’s Powerful Supercomputing
Technology
The Air Force’s combined Fawbush and Miller system is one of the
first operational systems to be powered by the HPE Cray EX
supercomputer, formerly known as “Cray Shasta”, which is a high
performance computing (HPC) architecture that was built from the
ground-up by Cray to support the magnitude and diverse sets of
architectures required for next-generation supercomputing. The HPE
Cray EX supercomputer will also power the upcoming three U.S.
exascale systems, including Frontier, which is expected to install
this year at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The HPE Cray EX supercomputers powering Air Force’s Fawbush and
Miller feature 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors to enable significant
compute performance to process large and complex volumes of
computations necessary to simulate weather data.
“We are thrilled to have built the U.S. Air Force a new
supercomputer that is one of the first operational systems powered
by the latest HPE Cray EX supercomputer and managed by Oak Ridge
National Laboratory (ORNL). The end-to-end HPC technologies made
possible by the HPE Cray EX supercomputer will enable greater speed
and dedicated performance to advance simulations in weather
forecasting that were never made possible before,” said Bill
Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC at HPE. “We look
forward to our continued collaboration with Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in supporting a range of complex science and engineering
research, which includes powering ORNL’s Frontier, one of the
nation’s upcoming exascale systems.”
U.S. Air Force to Introduce New Era of Weather Forecasting
Capabilities
The system’s new levels of performance and combined advancements
will enable the U.S. Air Force, in collaboration with ORNL’s
Computational Earth Sciences Division, to introduce completely new
forecasting capabilities over the next several years to make
breakthroughs in the following areas:
- Forecast stream flow, flooding, or inundation to predict
how much of a given land will be submerged in water and the level
of its depth. Researchers plan to achieve this by creating a global
hydrology model that involves simulating hundreds of watershed and
drainage basins to eventually increase accuracy in predicting
future events.
- Remote sensing of a cloud-covered area to address how to
navigate impacted missions through forecasting the formation,
growth and precipitation of atmospheric clouds. Researchers plan to
achieve this by using comprehensive cloud physics that are not made
possible with existing statistical regression models.
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud
platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations accelerate
outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere.
Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to
advance the way we live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and
intelligent technology solutions, with a consistent experience
across all clouds and edges, to help customers develop new business
models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance.
For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, EPYC, and combinations thereof are
trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210210005133/en/
Nahren Khizeran, HPE Nahren.Khizeran@hpe.com
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2024 to May 2024
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE)
Historical Stock Chart
From May 2023 to May 2024