According to Information Week IBM and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have announced that the first phase of a supercomputer called BlueICE, part of a system called the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation or ICESS, has been completed and installed by IBM. The system performed at a peak performance of 12 teraflops, nearly triple NCAR’s current computing capacity. IBM and NCAR expect BlueICE to being full operation in February ’07.

The second part of ICESS will be delivered in 2008 and is expected to last NCAR until 2011. "Scientists will be able to address capability problems in turbulence, nested regional climate modeling, and ocean modeling, as well as in near real-time numerical weather forecasting," said Tom Bettge, director of Operations and Services for NCAR' Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. "They'll be able to scale their codes into larger problem sizes or increase the complexity of the physics in their simulations."

BlueICE consists of IBM P5 575 SMP nodes equipped with IBM Power5+ 1.9GHz processors. The system sports 4 terabytes of memory and 150 terabytes of storage.  It will be the first supercomputer at the center to pass the sustained teraflop milestone.