HPC 2014-15 | Markets


forecasts and more reliable weather prediction is driving upgrades to its model suite to operate at higher resolution, and a substantial upgrade to petascale HPC capabilities by 2015–16. Te social and economic benefits that can


be realised are significant, not only through the better management of severe weather risk, but also from the capacity to undertake seasonal forecasting. Exemplifying the former is the potential mitigation, through more skilful weather forecasting, of losses of between 50 million and 100 million dollars per day, due to port closures and lost production, when cyclone warnings are in place in Australia’s northwest. Australia’s weather and climate modelling


suite, ACCESS, is a coupled model capable of operating over time scales that range from hours, for severe weather events, through days for weather forecasting, months for seasonable


“Highly accurate predictions of cyclone paths will have significant economic benefits for industry and human safety , which will be further enhanced when coupled with flood inundation modelling”


Night at the Murchison Wide-field Array telescope in Western Australia


in alignment with the data intensity of the investment priorities, and the data richness of partner institutions. Accordingly, the NCI and Pawsey systems, in addition to their role in computational simulation, are integral parts of high-performance data processing and analysis pipelines – a situation that differs markedly from most supercomputer centres that focus primarily on simulation and modelling. For example, the processing of data collected from precursor telescopes for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project will utilise 25 per cent of the Pawsey infrastructure on a dedicated 300+ teraflops system. Te situation at NCI is similar, in that climate simulations are combined with observational data for analysis using both the supercomputer and a specialist OpenStack cloud of supercomputer specification. In contrast, the VLSCI facility is highly focused on simulation.


Confronting our future l Natural disasters and economic outcomes


Australia occupies a continental landmass only slightly smaller than continental USA, with approximately 10 per cent of its population living within three kilometres of the coast. Australia’s latitude and climate make it prone to severe weather events such as tropical cyclones, floods and bushfires. Such events occur frequently during the summer season. Indeed they happened concurrently in the summer of 2010–11, placing the resources of BoM under considerable pressure due to the combination of severe flooding in the eastern states and bushfires in Western Australia, compounded by the devastation of Tropical Cyclone Yasi – a storm more powerful than Hurricane Katrina. Te imperative that BoM handle extreme situations with better localised


prediction, and decades and centuries for climate variability and change. A critical role is played by the NCI facility, which serves as the development platform for the next-generations of ACCESS, driven by a collaboration between BoM, CSIRO, and the academic community. Work is concurrently underway to optimise the scaling and I/O performance of ACCESS, to prepare it for the many-core processors of the future through a collaborative project involving NCI, BoM, and Fujitsu. Highly accurate predictions of cyclone paths


will have significant economic benefits for industry and human safety, which will be further enhanced when coupled with flood inundation modelling based on land topography. Tis latter part of the equation is already in place through ANUGA, an open source package developed by ANU and Geoscience Australia (GA) for modelling the impact of hydrological disasters such as dam breaks, riverine flooding, storm surges, and tsunamis. Tese capabilities, when further coupled with major earth observation collections (see Fig. 3), such as GA’s Data Cube, which holds decades of images of Australia taken by NASA’s Landsat satellites, will provide the ability to model flood runoff and the recharging of aquifers, with economic benefits for agriculture.


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