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Super Computer

Weather forecasting is certainly beyond the scope of merely guessing natural hazards and severe weather conditions. It is now regarded as an important element affecting a nation in many socioeconomic aspects. KMA believes that it should acquire both advanced core infrastructure and supercomputing power that are essential to the development of a highly reliable weather forecasting system into which observations, data analysis and forecasting are tightly integrated. To meet these demands, in 2004, KMA procured its “second supercomputer” system from Cray INC the System was installed through two phases: the initial system (2.4 Tflops of theoretical speed) in October, 2004 and the Second system in December, 2005.

Cray X1E Supercomputer

Cray X1E Supercomputer

The Cray X1E system will be used for the development of high resolution numerical models for more accurate forecasts, for the implementation of KMA’s “Digital Forecasting System” through exploitation of advanced IT technology, and for the enhancement of the medium to long range forecasting service. The system is composed of the main computing server of 8 Cray X1E cabinets, login servers, pre-post servers and storage system. The theoretical performance of the computing server is 18.5 Tflops, and the sustained performance of the new system is 15.7 Tflops, putting it at the 16th position among the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The X1E system is a liquid cooled parallel vector processor system. Each X1E module contains four Multi-streaming processors (MSPs) and has 16 GB of UMA (Uniform Memory Access) shared memory. Each MSP has four scalar and four vector processors sharing a cache chip placed in an MCM (Multi-Chip Module).

To maintain the system in a secured environment with constant electricity, temperature and humidity, the system is housed in an IDC (Internet Data Center), located outside KMA. The communication Links between IDC and KMA are four dedicated lines with one-Gigabit bandwidth each.

Performance of Supercomputer

Performance of Supercomputer

Specification Units
Introduction Year 2005
Name of Model Cray X1E
Number of CPUs 1024
Performance(Tflops) 18.5
Memory Capacity(GB) 4096
Disk Capacity(TB) 84
Number of Nodes 256
Tape Storage(PB) 1.2