Instituto Nacional De Pesquisas Espaciais

High Performance Computing Speeds Data Analysis and Improves Weather Forecasting

The Instituto Nacional De Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), or the National Institute for Space Research, is part of the Brazilian government’s Ministry of Science and Technology. Its two main focuses are space research and atmospheric sciences. The “Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos” (CPTEC/INPE) division is responsible for providing weather forecasts and climate data for Brazil and South America, including mapping the Amazon Rainforest. It is one of about a dozen major worldwide centers studying climate change.

Customer Challenges

Increase high-performance computing resources to keep pace with technological advances
Provide the capabilities necessary to quickly complete increasingly complex climatic analyses
Maintain the center’s position as one of the major climate research centers in the world

Solution

This climate research center leveraged a 4.4-teraflop (sustained LINPACK) cluster of 275 Sun servers with 1,100 processors for weather forecasting and climate analysis.

Business Results

Created the largest high performance computing cluster in South America
Allowed development and research of new Weather and Forecasting models
Provided rapid data processing capabilities necessary for delivering more accurate forecasts

Products and Services

Story Details

The challenge at hand for the CPTEC/INPE was to keep pace with technological change and support an increasing number of highly complex climate analyses. The center’s aims are to remain among the top dozen or so major centers worldwide that study climate change and also to continually improve upon weather forecasting capabilities. One key need is to very rapidly process large amounts of data so that timely forecasts can be published.

The CPTEC/INPE had been using a 768 Gigaflops environment based on a NEC SX-6 supercomputer with 12 nodes and a total of 96 vector processors. They decided to acquire a Sun solution due the trends and needs for development and research of newer or unknown problems. It also saw merit in this because of the recent trend in meteorological forecasting of moving from vector-based supercomputers to massively parallel computing environments. Sun, along with their partner NEC, had the ability to provide a complete solution, including the hardware for the infrastructure, a solid software stack, and comprehensive support services including on-site technical support and consulting services.

" This Sun high-performance computing environment is the platform we need to enable us to process a large amount of data very quickly and help us to continually improve upon the quality of our forecasts. "

— Jose Paulo Bonatti, Director, Division of Data and Modeling, CPTEC/INPE

The new high performance computing environment is a 4.4-teraflop, 1,100 AMD Opteron processor environment consisting of 275 Sun Fire X2200 M2 server nodes, including 72TB of data on the Sun Fire X4500 integrated on a non-blocking Infiniband network. This is a stateless “Beowulf”-like architecture that involves the X2200s acting like small building blocks, integrated with Lustre File System, tightly interconnected and managed. In addition to the Sun Fire X4500s (Lustre Object Data), CPTEC also chose Sun STK 6140s to house the Lustre Metadata and also for general user storage. Sun Professional Services provided help to deploy the cluster as well as the needed infrastructure. Finally, the Sun Customer Ready Program allowed CPTEC to receive a completely integrated solution in a matter of weeks, including the non-Sun hardware.

This solution was the best fit due to the quality, flexibility and performance of the Sun solution. When application development and porting to a scalar cluster platform is complete, this computing environment may run the center’s global model for all weather forecasting. This solution is the largest high-performance computing research environment in South America, and increases the center’s computing power by nearly six-fold and has earned a place on The Top 500 list of the 500 fastest computer systems.

The CPTEC/INPE officially launched this new platform in July, 2007 in conjunction with the center’s 13th anniversary. This complex project required the combined knowledge, resources and experience of NEC and Sun Microsystems working together. The companies had previous experience working together to implement a similar high- performance computing environment in Japan and were able to leverage their partnership and experience to assist with this implementation.