GAEA is located in Oak Ridge, TN, and is operated by the National Climate-Computing Research Center (NCRC). The NCRC is a collaborative effort between the Department of Energy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is located within the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory at ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS).
Gaea is comprised of two HPE-Cray EX 3000 systems. The aggregate Gaea system contains a peak calculating capability greater than 20 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second).
Two high-capacity parallel filesystems provides over 150 petabytes fast access storage. The center-wide filesystem is connected using FDR InfiniBand to the center’s compute and data-transfer resources.
NOAA uses Gaea to study the earth's notoriously complex climate from a variety of angles. Gaea powers research into the relationship between climate change and extreme weather, such as hurricanes. Gaea enables scientists to better understand the relationship between the atmosphere’s chemical makeup and climate and assists to unlock the climate’s role played by the oceans that cover nearly three-quarters of the globe.
