About a quarter of NIWA’s business relies on our supercomputers, including climate model updates, flood modelling, space science and remote sensing. That means the sheer volume of calculations and data generated by our third generation supercomputing systems have physically worn out, exhausted or overwhelmed the hardware.
Planning for a successor has been three years in the making and NIWA’s fourth-generation supercomputer is now up-and-running at its new home in Auckland.
Divided into two parts, Cascade (our supercomputer) and Rapids (our scientific data archive) offer the latest in supercomputer technology. They are being housed at two different CDC data centres – in Hobsonville and Silverdale – for disaster recovery purposes and so each can act as backup for the other.
For greater connectivity, a high-speed network between the two data centres lets the two computers talk to each other, and allows access if the public network is disrupted.
Cascade comprises 61,440 CPU cores, 7 petabytes of storage and 240 terabytes of RAM, across 320 servers connected by 7.5 kilometres of data cable.
The result is 2.4 petaflops (floating point operations per second) of compute power – a human would take roughly 32 million years to do a similar number of calculations.
The advance in technology means three times more generational power than our previous supercomputer which, for something like climate research allows for higher resolution and more frequent processing plus the use of additional AI workloads.
Now that Cascade is built, testing has shown significant advances in our most powerful models, like the New Zealand Convective Scale model (NZCSM – our flagship high-resolution forecast). Cascade produces 43 hours of NZCSM forecasting for each hour of compute time compared with 22 hours per compute hour on our previous supercomputer.
However, NIWA’s supercomputing teams have also worked hard to ensure Cascade is as climate-friendly as possible. The electricity supplied to CDC’s datacentres is 100 per cent generated from renewable sources, and the advanced liquid cooling system used is a fully closed loop, minimising the amount of water required. This helps to ensure that the footprint of our models and AI is as light as possible.
Testing of Cascade’s peak performance has shown greater energy efficiency than expected. The reduction in energy use is likely to save about $1.5 million over Cascade’s lifespan compared with design plans.
Rapids is also specially designed to cope with the exponential demand for access to large environmental datasets. Starting with 22 petabytes and scaling to 100 petabytes in the next decade, Rapids will be a safe storage location for NIWA and New Zealand's valuable science data, while ensuring new research can continue to add value to it.
“Climate research in atmospheric rivers alone requires petabytes of data,” says Chief Scientist – Advanced Technology Jess Robertson.
“The growth in the use of AI is the reason we invested heavily in the supercomputer’s ability to consume large datasets for this generation of machine.”
REANNZ (the Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand) and NIWA have agreed to provide Crown-funded access to Cascade and Rapids, not just for NIWA researchers, but New Zealand’s entire science sector. This will help enable ongoing collaboration across the science community.