Brenda Marie Rivers
General Dynamics’ information technology business has installed an update to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hera CS500 supercomputer that supports modeling work for weather monitoring efforts.
NOAA awarded GDIT a task order in 2018 to help modernize and manage the Hera high-performance computing system housed at the agency’s Environmental Security Computing Center in Fairmont, Va., GDIT said Wednesday.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cray jointly built the CS500 system.
The recent updates to Hera enabled it to reach a capacity of 3.3 petaflops and rank 88th in Top500.org’s list of fastest supercomputers in the world, according to GDIT.
Kevin Connell, vice president of science and engineering and executive leader of the HPC Center of Excellence at GDIT, said the Hera system updates will “directly benefit†NOAA’s research efforts focused on improving weather forecasting and community safety.
Craig McLean, assistant administrator for oceanic and atmospheric research at NOAA, noted that the agency is "proud to have such capacity" at the West Virginia center to support weather modeling, ocean ecosystem forecasting and climate visualization.
The Hera milestone builds on GDIT’s experience supporting five NOAA HPC environments, including the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System currently under development.
