Eighth-Grader Wins Contest, His Entry 'Derecho' Will Be New Name For NCAR Supercomputer
(AP/CBS4) — A middle school student has won a contest to name one of the world's fastest supercomputers. The new machine will be named "Derecho," after a type of weather event that can bring hurricane-force winds and heavy rains, the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research announced Monday.
Cael Arbogast, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Riverton Middle School in central Wyoming, submitted the winning name for the supercomputer that will be used to study phenomena including climate change, severe weather, wildfires and solar flares. It will be housed at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center on the outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
"I picked this name because a derecho is an intense, widespread, and fast-moving windstorm that travels long and great distances, bringing many storms with it," Cael wrote with his submission. "This new supercomputer has to move at fast speed for everybody to use all across the country."
Last June a derecho formed in southeast Utah and traveled across the entire state of Colorado, producing wind gusts up to 110 mph. The storm led to injuries for a man and his young daughter when a tree fell in southwest Denver.
Houston-based Hewlett Packard Enterprise won a bid to provide the $35 million to $40 million replacement machine for the supercomputing center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research announced in January.
The HPE-Cray EX supercomputer will likely rank among the world's 25 fastest when it goes into operation in 2022. It will have a theoretical maximum speed of almost 20 quadrillion calculations per second, 3.5 times faster than the center's current supercomputer, according to NCAR.
The center opened in 2012 and has aided the work of thousands of researchers from hundreds of universities and other institutions around the world.
The facility's existing supercomputer, named Cheyenne, is over three times faster than its predecessor, which was named Yellowstone.
RELATED: Top 2020 Colorado Weather Events Included Rare Rocky Mountain Derecho
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