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Blue Sky 2
Wed Dec 22, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Do you remember 2001, A Space
Odyssey? Well, here we go: today, Jeff Kuehn takes us inside one of the most powerful
computers on the planet at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder,
Colo.
JK: This is the machine we call "Blue Sky." It consists of 50 IBM Power4 Regatta
servers tied together with a very high-speed switch called "Colony."
BY: I notice the color’s actually black. How come you call it Blue Sky?
JK: Because we’re predicting atmospheric behavior!
BY: How many units are there here, in the big one?
JK: It’s 50 servers, each server has 32 processors.
BY: And one of these processors—how would that compare to, like a home PC?
JK: One of them would show up as being a little bit faster than a very high-end home
PC. Or in fact a very high-end PC workstation.
BY: Are people disappointed to find out it doesn’t look like HAL?
JK: Usually. They expect blinking lights; they expect spinning tape drives, and those
sorts of things. Instead what we have is a tape robot that sits in a silo in the back and
you don’t get to see much of anything.
BY: Except, you can feel the power of computational thinking in this room.
JK: That’s the air conditioning. (laughs) Now, we can actually hear the power being
drawn if we go back into the electrical room. You can hear the magneto-striction from
the UPS boxes. But, you know, that’s just a really loud hum, and anyone who’s been
near a power station has heard that before.
Supercomputer speeds are increasing so fast that, within the last year, Blue Sky has
dropped from the 13th fastest computer on the planet, down to the 39th. The Weather
Notebook receives funding from Subaru of America. Find all of our shows online at
www.weathernotebook.org.
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