New $100M computer 'Rhea' will apply AI to boost NOAA's weather forecasting capabilities - UPI.com (2024)

"Rhea," NOAA's new high-performance computer will join the HPC Hera supercomputer, which is currently operating at the NOAA Environmental Security Computing Center in Fairmont, W.V. Photo courtesy of NOAA

NOAA's Rhea computer was "named for the Greek goddess and mother of gods," the agency said.

"The Rhea high-performance computer system adds needed computing capacity for NOAA to expand critical research that supports the nation's climate resilience," Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael C. Morgan wrote Tuesday in a news release.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is a scientific and regulatory agency under the U.S. Department of Commerce that is tasked with a wide range of U.S. weather and other science-related duties.

Morgan says the new computer system "will strengthen NOAA's exploration and application of artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities," which he added will "ultimately improve weather, ocean and climate forecasting, ecosystem modeling and the use of satellite Earth observations to understand climate changes."

The Commerce Department relayed how the new $100 million state-of-the-art high-performance computer system was paid for by funding provided in President Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Funding for Rhea was awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology, a global technology company with headquarters in Falls Church, Va., that delivers a wide-range of services "to every major agency across the U.S. government, defense and intelligence community," according to GDIT.

The new computing capacity will also be used for weather and climate model development to improve drought, flood and wildfire prediction and forecasting. It will add about eight petaflops of computing speed and capacity to NOAA's existing capacity of 35 petaflops, bumping the total to 43 petaflops.

A petaflop is one thousand trillion, or one quadrillion, operations per second, and represents an extremely fast computing speed for a single machine, according to NOAA officials.

The agency said Rhea features graphics processing units that "will accelerate NOAA's use of AI/ML in a range of areas," which includes monitoring marine life species, weather forecasting and modeling of specific "environmental phenomena" such as atmospheric rivers, fire weather and hurricane intensification using Earth observations.

An NOAA official claims the investment in higher-performance computing "will result in significant scientific and economic impacts."

"The computer's installation at the NOAA Environmental Security Computing Center in West Virginia will strengthen NOAA's partnership with the West Virginia High Technology Foundation, which is committed to building a stronger, more diverse economy for the region," Zachary Goldstein, NOAA Chief Information Officer and director of High Performance Computing, said.

Rhea, once actively online, will be part of NOAA's Research and Development High Performance Computing System, which include the likes of four other research and development HPC centers in Boulder, Colo.; Princeton, N.J.; Oak Ridge, Tenn., and on the campus of Mississippi State University in Starkville.

According to NOAA, its Research and Development High-Performance Computing System already has helped the agency improve weather forecasting and climate projections.

By increasing the warning times for hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis, HPC "has helped researchers better understand ocean dynamics, our changing climate and its impacts and supported private enterprise with research to inform economic decision making."