Scientists across the country, including at the University of Colorado Boulder, will begin using a new supercomputer this month at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Wyoming location to assist in their research.

The supercomputer, named “Derecho,” will be used to assist with projects dealing with wildfires, climate change, space weather and other studies of the Earth system.

“We are very pleased that Derecho has passed through the testing phase and is beginning operations,” Thomas Hauser, interim director of NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, stated in a news release.

“This new system provides us with a major boost in supercomputing performance and is an invaluable asset as the nation’s scientists work to better understand the Earth system.”

Derecho can perform 19.87 quadrillion calculations per second, 3.5 times faster than NCAR’s previous supercomputer, Cheyenne.

It is also energy efficient, using only 40% more electricity than Cheyenne.

The supercomputer was installed earlier this year at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne and went through months of testing.

Derecho was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and cost about $35 million to build, with funding coming from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Scientists at NCAR and universities across the country conducting 15 different projects will be the first to use Derecho under the Accelerated Scientific Discovery program.

The program allows scientists working on these projects to have “nearly exclusive use” of the supercomputer for a few months, according to the news release.

One of these projects, led by CU Boulder professor and researcher Keith Musselman, hopes to strengthen the understanding of the potential impacts of climate change on Arctic rivers, fish and Indigenous communities.

The use of the new supercomputer “presents a unique outcome multiplier” that would help researchers “better characterize the possible range of future climate and river conditions,” according to the project page.