In an announcement today, IBM said it will start assembling the new 12Tflop (12 trillion floating-point operations per second) supercomputer next month at NCAR's headquarters in Boulder, Colo. It will go online in February after a period of testing and configuring. IBM did not release the price for the machine, the first of two new supercomputers to be built in phases for NCAR through 2008.

Tom Engel, a high performance computing specialist at NCAR, said the new hardware -- nicknamed Blueice -- includes 872 dual-core IBM Power5+ 1.9 GHz CPUs, for a total of 1,744 CPUs in a 10-rack cluster. Blueice is four times more powerful than "Bluesky," the IBM supercomputer it will supplement.

"The scientists here are always excited about having bigger and better computers," Engel said. "We just wish we had more money to buy them more."

NCAR currently has 15Tflops of computing power available to it through Bluesky and a sister IBM supercomputer, known as Bluevista, Engel said. In 2008, the second phase of the hardware upgrade at NCAR will add a 57Tflop supercomputer. The two phases are part of the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation infrastructure being built at NCAR.

A key reason for using supercomputers is to advance the study of weather and climate, Engel said. Some of that work involves the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Geneva-based international group set up to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic data related to global climate change and its potential impacts.