Geosciences High Performance Computing Research Consortium Workshop
25-27 September 2006

NCAR is hosting a workshop September 25-27 2006 seeking NSF geosciences community participation in planning and scoping a High Performance Computing Research Consortium for the Geosciences.

The goal of the workshop is to provide the Geosciences directorate with a compelling, community-supported plan for implementing the “Petascale Collaboratory for the Geosciences” vision. Key questions to be addressed during the workshop include

• What is the best balance between capability and capacity for the Geosciences?
• What is the “sweetspot” for capability computing in the Geosciences?
• What research opportunities are being missed in the current computing climate?
• How should a high capability node be designed and optimized to support the Geosciences community?
• What governing and allocation model(s) make sense for the full Geosciences community?

NCAR is currently engaged in planning a significant upgrade of its supercomputing capabilities and wants to ensure that its plans contribute to creation of petascale capabilities for the geosciences community. It is critical that the geosciences community has a strong plan closely aligned with NSF’s overall cyberinfrastructure roadmap and other national strategies in this area.

This workshop will build on the vision of recent the “Petascale collaboratory for the Geosciences” scientific and technical reports. These reports call for a “Petascale collaboratory for the Geosciences with the mission to provide leadership-class computational resources that will make it possible to address, and minimize the time to solution of, the most challenging problems facing the geosciences”.

In order to ensure the widest possible participation in the workshop, NCAR will provide support for travel, lodging and per diem costs for invited attendees.

For further information, contact: dcpworkshop@ucar.edu