Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator

eecue writes "Earlier this year I went on vacation to japan. At the end of my trip I was lucky enough to receive a tour of the Earth Simulator, which is the world's fastest super computer. I took pictures and wrote about it."

Comments

Re:Reliability of its predictions

[Turbyne]

I don't know if climate prediction was its main task, but anyway:

1. Read up on the Lorenz equations.
2. Spend a week or 2 in Boston and see how random weather can really get.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

world's fastest supercomputer or world's fastest public supercomputer? heh. better ask the LLNL/NSA boys about that one...

The problem is grid size.

[MyNameIsFred]

I've read in various articles that supercomputer weather prediction systems look at around 200,000 points on the earth surface. With the points being a few km apart. When you think about the size of the earth, this is a very fine grid. However, when you think about a specific person, the spacing is hugh. Hence the problem with weather prediction. A few km can mean the difference between a downpour in a city, or completely missing it.

Re:Reliability of its predictions

[Anonymous Coward]

When your super-accurate weather prediction system would predict that next week there would be lots of snow and very difficult traffic, then so many people would decide to go to the mountains and spend next week snowboarding and skiing that this sudden and unpredicted traffic would in turn influence the weather and the prediction :-)

Re:Reliability of its predictions

[Teun]

Huh?

What about that peninsula between the Atlantic on one and the Pacific on another side plus Canada on its shore and Mexico connecting it to mainland?

Holes in the grid

[hughk]

You are quite right and one of the major issues is the holes in the grid, even at 3Km. Satellite based observation dosn't help much as you only 'see' the tops of any clouds and have no way to measure barometric pressure.

Many ships record information for the meteorlogical services, but the trouble is that only works where there are ships. In some of the meteorologically interesting places such as the poles are often shrouded in clouds and have few weather stations.

The truth is that many points must be interpolated. Points closest to civilisation are quite good because there are enough measuring stations. This means that short-term weather forecasts are quite good (except in the UK, where they may be right but delayed or advanced by up to a day) but deteriorates over about three days and over a week or so is extremely difficult.

Forget the calculations, if you don't have data points, you are just speculating.

In 30 years...

[medscaper]

...will we look back at this and scoff? Well, not scoff, just admire wistfully what we thought was amazingly fast?

Just curious. It seems that NASA computers that launched Apollo were amazing at the time - the cream of the crop - yet we have far surpassed that computing power, speed, storage in even laptops 30 or 40 years later.

I can't wait to see my grandkids' pc!