"Blueice will allow NCAR to make improvements on those models to add more atmospheric chemistry and ... to improve the accuracy of predictions for climate change," Engel said. "Those are the kinds of things these new supercomputers are going to allow NCAR scientists to do."

It will also assist in predicting the spread of wildfires such as those in California that last week killed five firefighters overrun by out-of-control flames. The wildfire modeling be used to help protect firefighters by better predicting how fires might travel depending on wind and topography, he said.

Each of the 10 refrigerator-sized racks burns 40 kilowatts (KW) of power continuously, about the same amount as the much-less powerful Bluesky machine. By comparison, a typical household in the U.S. burns about 10 KW of power continuously, Engel said. Blueice is also more space-efficient, taking up just a fifth of the floor space used by Bluesky.

David Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM, said Blueice will have 9.2TB of memory, 150TB of disk storage and a high-performance switch as an interconnect between all the nodes of the machine.

NCAR has about 1,200 scientist and researchers at its facility, which is one of 36 Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. NCAR's primary funding sponsor is the National Science Foundation and it is managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a non-profit consortium of universities.