Swansea University's Mike Barnsley Centre for Climate Change has unveiled an IBM supercomputer called Blue Ice as part of its official launch on 31 October 2008.
As professor of glaciology at Swansea University's School of the Environment and Society, and scientific director of the new centre, Prof Tavi Murray's primary areas of interest include fast-flowing glaciers and ice streams as well as glacier instabilities.
In particular, her work in these areas aims to measure past and predict future contribution from glaciers and ice sheets to sea-level rise and, in turn, the repercussions that such sea-level rise will have.
As one of the most rapidly changing parts of the cryosphere, and with many glaciers experiencing rapid thinning, time is of the essence in discovering the effects of these drastic changes.
Blue Ice's main system has 640 cores and a peak performance of 6.8 Teraflops (an industry recognised measure of high-performance computing where 'Tera' is 1012 and 'flops' stands for floating point operations per second), while the neighbouring Cell-based development platform provides an additional 3.6 Teraflops performance.
Blue Ice allows its users to perform calculations in a fraction of the time needed by a regular computer.
Add to this performance the power of five Deep Computing Visualisation workstations and four Cube displays and users can also convert any scientific data generated by Blue Ice into meaningful images, leading to better interpretation of the results.
This visualisation aspect, together with implementation and ongoing support of Blue Ice, is the result of a collaboration with OCF.
The entire operation has also been specifically designed to be energy efficient.
Blue Ice is housed in a 'green' data centre and includes energy efficient CPUs, which provide the high performance computing within a small physical footprint.
The new facility has been made possible thanks to a collaboration between IBM and Swansea University's Institute of Innovation.
