Emerging Technologies and Cray's new Shasta System for Weather, Water and Climate

High Performance Computing for Weather, Water and Climate is facing a rapid increase in the diversity of technologies. While individual processor core performance gains are slowing, the capabilities and performance of other elements of the HPC system, especially those that move data, continue to advance. Cray’s new Shasta system architecture is built around the new Slingshot interconnect, which brings new capabilities to reduce network congestion, allowing the network to run at much higher utilization while still improving runtime reproducibility and giving organizations the ability to run development jobs without impacting the time critical operational workload. Shasta systems will be deployed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the US Air Force 557^th Weather Wing and at several Department of Energy laboratories, where they will be used by the climate modeling community. While these will all be Cray Shasta systems, each will have a different mix of processors and accelerators. This talk will discuss the challenges and opportunities that this presents for this community as well as how Shasta will enable the convergence of data analytics, machine learning and simulation workflows in the Exascale era.