The new centre went "live" today on the occasion of a day-long conference on climate change hosted by the Pembrokeshire County Council that featured presentations from leading university and business researchers, including representatives of Chevron Corp., RWE nPower, and Swansea University. Mechdyne worked closely with OCF plc, the systems integrator for the climate change centre, on planning, design and installation of the HD-quality display and integrated stereo audio system.

"Visualization plays an important role in climate modelling by providing dramatic imagery that makes environmental science meaningful to policy makers and the general public, as well as scientists", stated Chris Clover, president and chief executive officer of Mechdyne. "This is one of many policy and business environments where decision makers without technical training can better understand complex subjects when the information is brought to life in computer models."

The wall size display system includes four separate 1920 x 1080 pixel image "cubes" that are capable of displaying one single computer-generated image or four unique images simultaneously. Each cube houses a rear-projection DLP display with high brightness, 1000 to 1 contrast ratio and wide viewing area. With a 70-in diagonal size, each cube has a screen area of approximately 61 in. x 34.3 in. (155 cm x 87 cm), creating a full HD-quality display with 10 ft x 5.7 ft (3.1 m X 1.74 m) screen area.

Blue Ice, the new Blue Gene supercomputer, now operational at Wales' Technium Pembrokeshire in the Mike Barnsley Centre for Research, enables researchers to more quickly understand the impact of environmental changes past, present and future - such as melting glaciers, melting ice sheets and rising sea-levels - on today's World. OCF, the UK's premier High Performance Computing integrator, is responsible for the overall design, implementation and ongoing support of the Blue Ice supercomputer.

Historical tidal records have shown that over the 20th century, global sea level has risen by 0.15 m and forecasts predict a further rise of between 0.09 and 0.88 m over the 21st century. It is believed that 20-30 percent of the last century's sea level rise came from the melt of glaciers.

Using the power of Blue Ice, researchers can now create simulation models on how melting glaciers and ice-sheets will impact society and the environment. The vast volumes of data generated by Blue Ice can be graphically displayed on large visualisation screens, leading to a better interpretation of results.

Professor Tavi Murray, the centre's Scientific Director and globally renowned for her work on the impact of climate change and rising sea-levels, commented: "As one of the most rapidly changing parts of the cryosphere, and with many glaciers experiencing rapid thinning, time is of the essence in discovering the effects of these potentially devastating environmental changes. The development of methods that address these issues is imperative for solving the climate change/sea level question. Blue Ice will help us do that."

OCF's unique design consists of 80 IBM HS21 Blades running dual quad core processors - totalling 720 cores and 8 CELL processor blades with Voltaire Infiniband interconnect. In addition, 5 DCV workstations and 4 CUBE displays provide visualization capabilities to the facility. There is 10TB of IBM DS4700 storage with IBM GPFS (General Parallel File System) a high-performance shared-disk file system that can provide fast, reliable data access from all nodes in a homogenous or heterogeneous cluster.

Ongoing support, using OCF's Cluster Management and Support Service, enables the Technium to focus all of its available IT resources to non-cluster related queries and user issues.