University of New Mexico weather prediction project shows new detail: New Mexico’s new supercomputer, the third fastest in the world, completed its first scientific application test run by an outside user early Wednesday. A weather forecast project by Professor Joseph Galewsky, UNM Earth and Planetary Sciences department, tracked how a hypothetical winter storm would play out over nearly three weeks in an area that would cover much of the Western Hemisphere. The test run was accomplished in three hours and nine minutes, and about one month after the supercomputer, named Encanto, arrived in New Mexico. Galewsky’s project is part of the ongoing acceptance testing overseen by the New Mexico Department of Information Technology. “Encanto is off to an impressive start,” Secretary Roy Soto of the New Mexico Department of Information Technology said. “New Mexico’s supercomputer simulated a week of weather in roughly an hour. This project has delivered from the very beginning.” The machine is scheduled for final installation and acceptance by the state in June 2008. The state purchased Encanto in 2007 to boost economic development and education efforts in New Mexico. The $11 million machine, approved by the 2007 Legislature, is projected to operate at 172 trillion calculations per second. That massive computing power can allow companies to develop new products, governments to model better traffic flows, and allows researchers like Galewsky to better predict the weather. “The sheer size of the record setting snowstorm of Dec. 29, 2006 that brought much of New Mexico to a standstill was not predicted far in advance by computer weather models,” said Galewsky. “Existing weather forecast models can only resolve weather features that are 20 to 30 kilometers in scale, but wintertime storms, such as the 2006 record, involve weather features as small as a few kilometers. These simulations on Encanto provide new insight into the processes that control New Mexico winter storms and will hopefully help to improve their forecast.” Galewsky stressed that Encanto allowed his project to pinpoint what happens on a much smaller scale. “Encanto enables breakthrough science because of the fine-grained resolution it enables in these studies,” said Tim Thomas of UNM’s High Performance Computing Center. “This is just a demonstration of how easily one can get potentially groundbreaking science running on this machine.” Galewsky’s project used 4,050 of the 14,336 Intel Xeon processor cores on Encanto. That’s about 28 percent of the total computing power on the world’s third fastest machine. The University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University and New Mexico Tech have signed on as partners in the New Mexico Computing Applications Center project, as well as Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. “This is just the kind of research from New Mexico universities we would like to promote and help to flourish,” said Tom Bowles, chief science advisor to Governor Bill Richardson. “The computing center is designed to match the expertise of our partners with real needs for the state in areas like water conservation and renewable energy.” Encanto is currently housed at Intel Corp. in Rio Rancho under a separate agreement between Intel and SGI.