If a superhero is a person with unusual powers who fights evil, then a Yellowstone is a supercomputer that should wear a cape. Its mission is nothing less than saving the world from climate change.
Yellowstone is a brand-new IBM supercomputer. It's the star of a new, 153,000-sq. ft. data center built by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
The NCAR is a United States government laboratory filled with weather and climate scientists looking for better ways to predict things like earthquakes and hurricanes and to monitor pollution and climate change.
As of November, Yellowstone is the 13th fastest supercomputer in the world, according to Top500, which ranks the 500 fastest computers. In geekspeak, it operates at 1.5 petaflops, or a quadrillion and a half mathematical operations per second; it has 4,000 nodes, or individual computers, and 70,000 cores, or processors. To put that in perspective, the newest MacBook Pro would be one node with 12 cores.
While most brand-new, $20 million data centers are locked up tight and do not allow visitors, NCAR welcomes them. It's owned by the American people, after all, and its mission is science and education.
Aaron Andersen, deputy director of operations for the Yellowstone project, recently took Business Insider on a VIP tour.
We got to see Yellowstone and the beautiful, new, super green facility up close.
The building is so huge, it wouldn't fit in the frame of our camera. It's so new, they haven't finished the landscaping yet.
Visitors are greeted by a giant cowboy-boot sculpture. It was a gift from the state, the University of Wyoming, and local businesses which chipped in to pay for the new facility.
Everything about this place is oversized, even the two-story foyer.
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