An official website of the United States government.

This is not the current EPA website. To navigate to the current EPA website, please go to www.epa.gov. This website is historical material reflecting the EPA website as it existed on January 19, 2021. This website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work. More information »

High Performance Computing: The Computational Resources behind the Agency’s Environmental Modeling and Visualization

Image of several data sets shown on the Remote Sensing Information Gateway, showing air quality.

Image of several data sets shown on the Remote Sensing Information Gateway (RSIG), showing air quality.

High Performance Computing (HPC) provides the infrastructure, software and technical support for EPA researchers and scientists to run their own compute jobs on EPA HPC machines.  This enables quick and easy access to the resources needed for a variety of research, including work on the General Coastal Ecosystem Model (GCEM) and the  Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ) -- a powerful computational tool used by EPA and states for air quality management. 

The main server that provides high-end scientific computing resource for Vis/HPC projects and models is the HPC system Atmos.

Compute time on Atmos is shared by EPA scientists and researchers. The primary applications are atmospheric modeling, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, and statistical modeling. Projects are allocated time on the HPC system through an annual review process. Allocations for projects total over 22 million CPU hours for FY 2019.

Visualization Resources

Sophisticated visualization hardware and software support high-end, R&D visualization computing, providing the ideal technology for projects such as modeling the human respiratory system or wind flow through an urban landscape. These visualizations can be converted to animations for display or graphics suitable for publishing.