Wednesday in Wyoming -- April 10, 2013

When you look at this, does the name "Yellowstone" pop into your mind?  Admittedly, it doesn't look much like the famous national park, but if you look closely, you'll see that each of the end panels has part of a photo of Yellowstone.

So, what is this Yellowstone?  It's a super-computer that's part of NWSC. 

• NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research)  -- yes, another acronym!
• Wyoming
• Supercomputing
• Center

What you're seeing are a few of the 100 computer cabinets that house more than 74,000 parallel processors.  That's a lot of computing power, and it's all located just outside Cheyenne.  Why Cheyenne?  Besides the incentives that the city and state provided and the partnership with the University of Wyoming, one of the reasons this particular location was chosen was that the cool, dry, windy climate provides some natural cooling -- very important with that many computers.

The list of research projects for Yellowstone is impressive.  Now, if only we'd have more accurate weather forecasts.