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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."
I wonder if we can slashdot the worlds fastest supercomputer? ;-)
I wonder how far in advance things like, say, the climate can be predicted, even by such a powerful computer. It's almost impossible to predict the weather for even a small area (I live in the Netherlands) for more than the coming few days to a week, because it's so sensitive to small errors. (That doesn't mean I'm not impressed by the thing, of course.)
If they are going to simulate the earth...then of course as part of the earth, they will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(1)...which will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(2) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(1) which will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(3) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(2) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(1)..etc.etc.etc...and of course that must go on indefinitely! Dont they have better things to spend millions of dollars of processing power on?
The article mentions that "They were afraid to mention on their website that they offered tours as there were only 3 english speaking employees of the lab". Now this hits Slashdot. Guess they may as well mention it on their site now, since it's already now known in the world of the rabid technophile.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
Now I changed the password to the final 84 digits of pi. See ya suckers!
Looks like it's been #1 since at least June of last year.
http://www.top500.org/list/2002/06/
It's just a name for a really powerful computer to be used by scientists to run models of whatever it is they're studying. These things don't get covered in mainstream news. If you want more information on supercomputers, go to http://www.top500.org/ (No, your G4 didn't make it).
But as for the name "Earth Simulator", that's exactly what it is, a name. Who knows, in Japanese its name could be The Matrix.
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
muhahaha ..
wait, who slashdots themselves ?
what's a little bandwidth cost in the hopes of looking worldly & possibly attracting the attention of a g33k girl =) mmmmm
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
Yes and obviously you'd know more than the people who can design and build the most powerful computer in the world.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Beware of supermodels, though.
So if you are in Japan and you are as nerdy as me, email me and I will give you her contact address.
For the majority of people here, this would be the first female entry in their email client's contact list!
Man is she in for a bad time!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I understand its called earth simulator because it is used for simulations, but does the name also have something to do with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? That would be a cool thing. (In H2G2, the earth, which is the most powerful computer in the universe, is supposed to be a simulation run by mice with humans as the guinea pigs.)
Just a thought but if there is a climate change in the works today then it might be inevitable. If that's the case, then the computer might be able to tell you if it's coming or not by being given all the information about the environment for the last few years. It wouldn't be able to tell you if it was going to snow on Saturday but it might be able to tell you if it was eventually going to snow in the Sahara.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Everyone else does it and gets points.
"Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Cry, and they still think its funny." - Mr. Boffo
In Japanese, it's name is... "Earth Simulator"!
Wasn't that a surprise?
Pls. Don't tell anybody that we geeks travel around the world to look at computers,
If any none nerds find out ! it just confirms the general believe that we are all a group
Of sad persons with no life
I just hate bit SPAM, (www.netnoise.com.kh)
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.
Mr admin please ban this fool and his small mind!
most people should start with a visit at the LIFE simulator
Fleur de Sel
its totaly worthless due to the fact Microsoft tech support says windblows just isnt compatable... /sigh
when they were putting a bypass through. It seems that the Vogons had their orders, and the orders included putting a bypass through right where the Earth Simulator was.
Rather than fail to complete their orders, they went ahead and demolished the entire thing. This one is a replacement.
[BTW... in case anyone wondered, the answer is 42].
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
F U
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Now if you know something about what causes the strange attractors - for instance the Gulf Stream - you may be able to model the effect of moving an attractor, and so get useful work done.
To give another example - airflow over a wing may be turbulent (i.e. chaotic), but it's still possible to model the aerodynamics to the detail that we need to build an aeroplane.
So, you are a nerd, but you don't have the slightest idea of how light reflects on surfaces like plastic and glass?
Rule of thumb: if flash light falls at a right angle at a glass surface, it will bounce back and you'll have an _ugly_ _bright_ spot in your picture. Use either a circular polarizer filter, don't use flash at all and use better film.
About the composition, no, there's not much you can do about that technic-wise. Just look at your pictures and learn from your mistakes for the next time.
Cheers,
A. "won't open an account" C.
This is the fundamental obstacle to simulation of natural phenomena. However, while local parameters remain hard or impossible to predict, global parameters are easier to forecast, and computing power helps. This is where supercomputers come in: for example, they help us study the effect of global warming far out into the future.
> She told me that they were afraid to mention on their website that they
> offered tours as there were only 3 english speaking
> employees of the lab.
Just imaging whats going to happen now.
Thousands of programmers now know that tours
are avaliable and 1% are going to want tours.
Looks like they will be hireing an english speeking tour guide.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
In case you missed that part when you were skimming James Gleick's book on chaos theory, the whole point of it is that although it's very difficult to predict anything over the short term/on a fine scale, the overall tendency of a chaotic system may present a regular pattern if the data is interpreted in the right way.
That's why, when plotting a Lorenz strange attractor, you can't predict where the next point will fall - but you can predict the butterfly shape that those points will form.
Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator
At first, I read the title as:
Nerd 'Vacation to the Earth' Simulator
when it's actually
'Nerd Vacation' to the 'Earth Simulator'
The distinction is important.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Nerds have a tough time taking vacations, apparently, hence the need for vacation simulators?
Nice one, thank you very much.
But you really should learn how to control the flash and white balance of your camera. Hey, and does the lady have a face ?
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.
See my journal, I write things there
No-one can be told what the Earth Simulator is. You have to see it for yourself.
...does it have USB? Fucking *useless* if I can't plug my camera in!
As far as the command set goes it's a vector processor. That means it has an instruction set that is completely unlike any standard scalar (Von Neumann) archictecture processor you may be familiar with. The CRAY series of supercomputers were one of the first vector processors around; do a google search for "CRAY Instruction Set Reference Card" and have a look. That will give you some insight on how a vector processor is programmed. Most instructions support 3 operands - 2 source and a destination argument.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
-Lucas
I've read that underwater currents have a huge effect on the earth's weather.
Anyone know if the Earth Simulator is taking measurements from these currents?
-metric
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!
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
Well it is sort of true that supercomputers are useless. This 4 week time span mentioned above is actually from 1960, when it was possible to forecast weather 2 days in advance but a month was thought possible. In 1974 this expectation was dropped to 10 days, and today, it is agreed (see Tennekes among others) that 7 days is the limit for accurate forecasting even as computing power increases without limit. So really, this big toy should take us a little closer to the 7 day forecast actually being right, but not much further.
This is a stament about sigs that has no proof
There's a big difference between weather forcasting and climate forcasting.
Actually the supercomputer is not a weather simulator at all. The "weather simulator" came from wrong translation from Japanese by some American reporter. In direct translation from Japanese the computer name is "Tsunami Simulator", and tsunami second meaning in Japanese is atomic bomb. So there we are. It is simply an "A Bomb" simulator.
Please stop spreading the fad on Slashdot.
Thank you.
Anybody like his glasses in the pic? Reccomend them?
Can you cite a source for this? I noticed it shows "precipitation" in one of the pictures from his tour. Unless this is some kind of simulation of nuclear fallout, then I don't think you are correct. From what I remember Japan doesn't do nuclear weapons research or posess nuclear weapons. Given what happened after WWII, they probably wouldn't want to have any nuclear weapons in there country anyway.
The digits of Pi, are, in essense a random stream of numbers. The chance of finding a specific single digit at any part in the stream, assuming a base system of 10, and ignoring all other considerations is 0.1. The chance of finding it after looking twice is 0.1 + (0.1 * 0.9). Three times is 0.1 + (0.1 * 0.9) + (0.1 * 0.9^2).
Therefore looking for the digit n times is the sum of the series 0.1 * (0.9)^i. Which is a geometric series and equivalent to 0.1(1 - 0.9^n) / (1 - 0.9), which equals (1 - 0.9^n). Thus, the average number of tries to find an single digit is (log 0.5/log 0.9) =~ 6.57881
What about two digits? A similar solution: (log 0.5/log 0.99) =~ 68.9676. Three digits? 692.801. Four? 6931.13.
Thus, the amount of data is approximately 70% of the original (a digit with 10 possible solutions found after an average of approximately 7 searches). So this algorithm would compress data down, on average, by 70%. Not bad, but not great either, especially considering the computing power to achieve this. There are much more efficient algorithms around today in terms of computing power vs. compression.
Mathemeticians have been working on numerical approximations of functions (DiffEq, for example), and have been dealing with trying to reduce the error in approximations for centuries, with all the problems involving the approximation getting worse as you leave the starting point and all that.
Yet it took until the 1960's for someone to figure out that subtle errors at any point in the use of a model of a complex system can cause problems?
I've always thought that was strange. . .
Make that: Assuming the digits of Pi are a stream of random numbers.
He shoulda played world battle on the earth simulator... Now that woulda prolly owned.
God spoke to me
The above argument doesn't appear to make sense now. If you can compact an arbitary sequence of numbers by 70%, then you can keep passing the same data again and again through the system and reduce any string of data to a much smaller length. By information theory, this should be impossible, shouldn't it? Anyone now where I've screwed up?
What use is a gallery of photos with names like C11054 and no damned descriptions of what we are viewing?
Anyone remember that? Talk about the Earth Simulator always reminds me of that game. Why, why wont the dasies die!?! Even with Nuclear tests!!!
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
There's a big difference between climate and weather. One is a boundary-value problem; the other is an initial-value problem. For those without the terminology, climate refers to average weather over time.
For example, I can look at the weather for the last few years for wherever you live and tell you very reliably within a few degrees what the average temperatures will be in December and June next year. These are driven mostly by the easily calculable changes in energy flux from the sun.
You might be tempted to dismiss such basic observations, but anyone who is concerned about possible global warming scenarios--and I'd argue everyone should be--should be curious to know what can be predicted about climate
.Hmm, well according to their title graphic, it's "chikyuu shimyure-ta". Which does translate into Earth Simulator.
</PI-encoded-message-begin>
<start-digit > 09754198093241062140396080639620967866
<messag e length > 852
<subencoding> EBCDIC
</PI-encoded-message-end>
(spacin g brought to you by the slashdot linebreaker alogorithm and the number e.)
Yes, that's what I said...
Unforunately, no one can be told what the Earth Simulator is; you have to see it for yourself.
Unless you're a Slashdot editor ;)
Interesting how world events seem to only affect America. Presumably Dubya will us this Texan tornado as a justification for carpet bombing Brazil - this "butterfly wings" undoubtedly a codename for some sort of Weapons of Mass Destruction...
---------
"I can DoS people's cars from my GBA."
NHK just had a documentary about Earth Sim a few days ago, in fact. They showed some results from the computer. One I found especially interesting was a earthquake energy distribution if an earthquake was to occur near atama. Watch some TV and you can save big train-fare bux. =)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I bet it still won't play SimCity4 at a playable speed.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
The fact that 6 * 9 is 42 in base 13 implies a very strange number of digits for the ultimate lifeform in Douglas Adams' HHG universe.
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)