Yellowstone: A Dedicated Resource for Earth System Science

Yellowstone is housed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The NCAR is a federally funded research and development center devoted to advancing the atmospheric and related sciences. The benchmark suite used during the Yellowstone procurement process was designed to mirror the science needs of the NCAR user community. The Yellowstone environment provides dedicated petascale computational and data resources to the US atmospheric science communities, enabling dramatic improvements in resolution, better representations of physical processes, longer simulation length, and better statistics for a broad spectrum of important Earth System science applications. The data-centric considerations also influenced the design of Yellowstone's data analysis and visualization systems, where memory size on some nodes was increased to one terabyte to reduce the amount of disk I/O in data analysis workflows. Climate-related simulations represent nearly half the workload on Yellowstone. Climate models are typically run from decadal to millennial scales, and they require 64-bit precision computations for accuracy.