Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced it was awarded a $35+ million contract to build a new supercomputer using its end-to-end high performance computing (HPC) technologies for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a U.S. federally funded R&D center focused on advancing knowledge of geosciences, including meteorology, climate change, and solar activity. The new system will be installed later this year at the National Center of Atmospheric Research -Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming and put into use in 2022. It is a significant upgrade to NCAR’s existing system, Cheyenne, running on HPE’s HPC solutions, which include compute, storage, networking and software and delivering nearly 3.5X faster speed. Latest system design will help NCAR process compute and image-intensive data to create digital models of various occurrences, from wildfires and solar storms to hurricanes and droughts, with greater accuracy. The system will be powered by HPE Cray EX supercomputer, which is a purposefully engineered HPC architecture to enable large, next-generation supercomputing, including exascale systems, and features the latest compute and dedicated AI performance. NCAR will use the system to tackle research in a wide range of earth’s phenomenal events, including determining how to make some predictions up to a decade in advance. Example research includes: Improving predictions of seasonal water supply, drought risk and flooding through detailed modeling and forecasting tools to inform water management experts, public utilities and farmers to help manage water resources. Managing wildfire risk by simulating complex representations of physical processes in a given region, which can help forecasts in wooded areas that are becoming increasingly prone to severe wildfires such as in U.S. states California and Colorado or in countries like Argentina, Australia and Indonesia. Simulations will factor in data from local winds and air density, soil moisture, and vegetation patterns such as types of grass and leaves. Foreseeing hazards and impacts of climate change from extreme weather conditions such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Better understanding patterns and processes involved helps narrow in radius of these forthcoming natural events. Understanding the dangers of solar storms using detailed, three-dimensional simulations of the sun's turbulent plasma flows and magnetic fields to enable predictions of potential solar impact that can disrupt the earth's atmosphere and trigger space weather events that threaten communications systems and power grids.