 |
Robert's Rules |
Happy New Year!
I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. For those of you who made New Year’s resolutions, good luck and work hard to stay with them.
Thanks again to the organizers of the SSEC holiday party and to the chorus for another great production!
The third floor business office is slowly but surely returning to full staffing. With Jenny returning half-time from maternity leave (congratulations again to Jenny and Denny Hackel on their bouncing baby boy, Theodore) and me returning from my surgery we are gradually picking up the pace. Thanks again for Wenhua Wu, Soniya Patel, Debbie Schroeder and Diane Daly for keeping the proposals flowing and getting the accounting information out in our absence.
The physical facilities of this area continue to change. In our building the physical plant folks are modifying the lighting in our rooms to save energy. Please be as patient as you can with the added noise and interruptions. The apartment building to our south east added a couple of floors in the 3 weeks I was gone. I’m hoping they stop pretty soon before they block even more of my view.
The break room on fourth floor looks great (great work Will, JoAnn and many others) so please feel free to use it! I checked with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery today and they have a coffee shop open now and plan to open their three restaurants in February. If the Union South grand opening is on schedule we will also have a couple of more restaurants to pick from by the end of April.
We also have some news on the supercomputer front. The excellent research produced by CIMSS scientists in demonstrating the positive impact of satellite measurements in numerical weather forecasts, plus the reputation of the SSEC Data Center for the highest standards of quality and reliability has resulted in NOAA/NESDIS inviting us to submit a proposal to host a supercomputer in our Data Center.
The proposal has been accepted and the supercomputer will be constructed this spring. The system will allow data assimilation experiments as well as observing system simulation experiments in a research environment using the U.S. operation data assimilation and forecast models. SSEC/CIMSS will have access to a portion of the supercomputer for relevant internal projects as well as selected proposals we submit to the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation.
The Linux cluster system will contain over 3,000 CPU cores in 64 compute nodes and contain over 8000 GB of memory. This is a very powerful system that brings NOAA, the Joint Center and SSEC/CIMSS into a close, long-term partnership.
This is another example of the exciting research projects Hank mentioned in his state of the center speech. So please continue to work hard, play hard and enjoy everything the campus and a wonderful Wisconsin winter has to offer.
